Author: Christian Bettstetter

Mini workshop on networked systems

Tuesday, October 16, 2018 Session A: Drone networks (09:00 to 10:40, 1 hour talks + discussions) Samira Hayat: Experimental evaluation of wireless communications for drones Aymen Fakhreddine: Cellular-connected drone systems: State-of-the-art and research issues Raheeb Muzaffar: Live multicast video streaming from drones Session B: Industrial, robot, and post-disaster networks (11:00 – 12:40, 1 hour talks + discussions) Jorge Schmidt: UWB sensor networks Agata Gniewek: Swarmalatorbots — Robots that sync and…

Intelligent boarding to ski lifts

A novel boarding solution for cabin-based transport systems — e.g., ski lifts, cable cars, subways — is being discussed in industry and has already been implemented in the Austrian skiing resort Bad Gastein: In order to avoid long queues at succeeding boarding stations, a display in the boarding area tells the guests how many of them are allowed to enter the next cabin. This form of access control guarantees spare…

A year in the life of Lakeside Labs

By Christian Bettstetter, Scientific Director Did you observe that lately more and more tech products and business processes have features of self-organization? Almost every major car maker has been testing self-driving vehicles and is now introducing them to the market. The industry is crazy about “industry 4.0”—which promises self-organizing production with humans, machines, and products collaborating to make decentralized decisions. These are just two examples for the ongoing trend toward…

UWB sensor networks in airplanes

Modern airplanes are equipped with hundreds of embedded sensors and actuators necessary for structural health monitoring, aircraft control, and passenger and crew assistance. These devices are typically interconnected by wires. Using wireless connections instead of wires improves flexibility of installations and reduces the airplane’s weight. Researchers from Airbus Group Innovations have been working on this topic for several years. An ongoing joint project with the University of Klagenfurt and Lakeside…

Austrian robotics workshop

About 80 researchers from industry and academia met at the Austrian Robotics Workshop in Klagenfurt on May 7 and 8, 2015, giving talks and demonstrations on recent developments in robotics and autonomous systems. Among them, various Lakeside Labs scientists presented their research in unmanned aerial vehicle systems, namely on wireless communications, collision avoidance, path planning, and video streaming. Two highlights were keynote talks given by invited experts: Sabine Hauert from…

Achieving consensus in networks with disturbances

The problem of finding a consensus in a group of people occurs in many social contexts. In a similar way, distributed algorithms for consensus play an important role in networked computing and communication systems if centralized decision making is difficult or impossible. Each entity in such a system processes only local information obtained from its neighbors and ideally performs only simple computations. Despite this simplicity, the process of consensus building…

Collaborative mapping with mobile robot teams

New packages for the Robot Operating System (ROS) are available for autonomous exploration of unknown environments using collaborating mobile robots equipped with cameras. The software offers wireless ad hoc communications between robots, merging of maps from different robots, and coordinated selection of exploration frontiers. A prototype with up to four robots was built that demonstrates its functionality in an indoor environment. There is a broad spectrum of applications for mobile…