A challenge for swarm robotics: using multiple drones to jointly transport a package

Whenever a package weighing more than a drone needs to be transported to a disaster area, it takes several mini drones to get the job done. Aamna Piracha is researching decentralized formation control and collaborative slung payload transport with multiple UAVs operating as a collective system. She is particularly interested in enabling drone swarms to safely and autonomously maneuver in cluttered and unpredictable environments while carrying rescue packages, such as through collapsed urban areas or narrow streets.

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Smarter recommendation systems that really know what I might need

How do you teach a computer to think? Not just calculating, remembering or combining information – but real, creative, human-like thinking? This is precisely the question that drives Ali Kookani, a doctoral student in the FWF-funded Cluster of Excellence ‘Bilateral AI’. His research focuses on smarter recommendation systems that are significantly better than previous ones at generating suggestions for which film I might want to watch next or which product I might want to buy.

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Robot swarms that scan an entire area

Many hands make light work: the same applies to multiple robots and drones, which are capable of quickly scanning large areas, and can also clean or inspect them. Khalil Al-Rahman Youssefi’s doctoral thesis focuses on developing new technologies that allow swarms of robots to fully map an area using a method known as ‘coverage exploration for robot swarms’.

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Taking a closer look at electricity consumption with the help of artificial intelligence

Using non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), it is possible to analyse which devices in a household are currently consuming electricity without having to attach separate measuring instruments to all of the consumers. Emir Sinanović, a university assistant in the Smart Grids working group at the Department of Networked and Embedded Systems, hopes to combine this analysis with a large-language model that works rather like ChatGPT.

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