Recent advances in artificial intelligence algorithms are leveraging massive amounts of data to optimize, refine, and improve existing solutions in critical areas such as healthcare, autonomous vehicles, robotics, social media, or human resources. The significant increase in the quantity of data generated each year makes it urgent to ensure the protection of sensitive information. Federated learning allows mach...
Robot localization is a crucial task in robotic systems and is a pre-requisite for navigation. In outdoor environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have aided towards this direction, alongside laser and visual sensing. Despite their application in the field, GNSS suffers from limited availability in dense urban and rural environments. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), inertial and visual metho...
The credibility of online examinations in Higher Education is hardened by numerous factors and use-case scenarios. This paper reports on a longitudinal study, that spanned over eighteen months, in which various stakeholders from three European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) participated, aiming to identify core threat scenarios experienced during online examinations, and to, accordingly, propose threat mo...
Artificial perception for robots operating in outdoor natural environments, including forest scenarios, has been the object of a substantial amount of research for decades. Regardless, this has proven to be one of the most difficult research areas in robotics and has yet to be robustly solved. This happens namely due to difficulties in dealing with environmental conditions (trees and relief, weather conditions,...
Forestry operations have become of great importance for a sustainable environment in the past few decades due to the increasing toll induced by rural abandonment and climate change. Robotics presents a promising solution to this problem; however, gathering the necessary data for developing and testing algorithms can be challenging. This work proposes a portable multi-sensor apparatus to collect relevant data ge...
To move out of the lab, service robots must reveal a proven robustness so they can be deployed in operational environments. This means that they should function steadily for long periods of time in real-world areas under uncertainty, without any human intervention, and exhibiting a mature technology readiness level. In this work, we describe an incremental methodology for the implementation of an innovative ser...
This paper addresses the Multi-Robot Patrolling Problem, where agents must coordinate their actions while continuously deciding which place to move next after clearing their locations. This problem is commonly addressed using centralized planners with global knowledge and/or calculating a priori routes for all robots before the beginning of the mission. In this work, two distributed techniques to solve the prob...