EC-SAFEMOBIL project

Project name: Estimation and Control for Safe Wireless High Mobility Cooperative Industrial Systems 
Project acronym: EC-SAFEMOBIL
Dates: 12.07.2011 - 14.01.2016
Total budget:  6,169,404.00 EUR
Funding:  FP7 - ICT
Grant Agreement number: 288082
 

The project EC-SAFEMOBIL was devoted to the development of sufficiently accurate common motion estimation and control methods and technologies in order to reach levels of reliability and safety to facilitate unmanned vehicle deployment in a broad range of applications. It also included the development of a secure architecture and the middleware to support the implementation.

The focus of the project was on very accurate coupled motion of multiple entities and on distributed safe and reliable cooperation and coordination. The aim was to precisely control hundreds of entities efficiently and reliably, as well as to certify developed techniques to support the exploitation of unmanned platforms in non-restricted areas. This development was validated in multiple scenarios, ranging from landing a fixed-wing UAV on a car through distributed surveillance with multiple UAVs to automated forklifts in industrial warehouses.

Warehousing scenario of EC-SAFEMOBIL project

The focus of the LARICS team in the project was on the automated warehouse scenario, in which we worked on high accuracy marker-less mapping and localization, as well as decentralized control of multiple free-ranging industrial forklifts. In the final demonstrator we showed that our solution is accurate enough for pallet pickup and stacking. We also showed that our finite state machine based decentralized algorithm enables forklifts to negotiate and resolve conflicts, preventing deadlocks in the system.

 

Pallet stacking experiment showcasing high precision of vehicle localization (vehicle and testing area provided by Euroimpianti SPA)

Two forklifts resolving conflict in the testing area (vehicles and testing area provided by Euroimpianti SPA)

The project was realized in coopearation with the following partners:

  1. Fundacion Andaluza para el desarrollo aeroespacial (FADA-CATEC) (ES)
  2. Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft und Raumfahrt EV (DLR) (DE)
  3. Airbus DS GMBH (Astrium) (DE)
  4. Indra sistemas S.A. (ES)
  5. Euroimpianti SPA (IT)
  6. Universidad de Sevilla (ES)
  7. Universitaet Duisburg-Essen (DE)
  8. University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (HR)
  9. Selex ES LTD (UK)

Six Pioneer P3-DX Robots Arrived for...

These days LARICS has experienced the invasion of new robots, which rushed in good hands of our students. Six mobile robots Pioneer P3-DX from Adept mobile robots will be used in research pursued within the 6.2 M EUR FP7-IP project Estimation and Control for Safe Wireless High Mobility Cooperative Industrial Systems – EC-SAFEMOBIL. This will allow practical demonstrations of distributed safe reliable cooperation and coordination of many high mobility entities.

The aim is to precisely control hundreds of entities efficiently and reliably and to certify developed techniques to support the exploitation of unmanned platforms in non-restricted areas. This development will be validated in two scenarios: industrial warehousing involving a large number of autonomous vehicles and surveillance also involving many mobile entities. 

Author: Alan Vukić
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