Core Faculty
Stephan Weiss acts as the speaker of this KPK. His research focus and expertise is in state estimation/control and (multi-)sensor fusion for accurate navigation of resource constrained aerial vehicles in 3D space. His algorithms for on-board visual-inertial navigation of micro helicopters were the first to enable autonomous flights of small aerial platforms in GPS-denied environments and continue to serve as benchmarks for newer approaches by international research groups. At NASA JPL, apart of leading research projects in his field of expertise, he also successfully led interdisciplinary research projects in e.g. the area of precision agriculture. He is now continuing this interdisciplinary research at AAU with two newly acquired FFG projects in the area of autonomous forest inventorying and precision agriculture. He continuously improved his skills in educating young researchers in his field of expertise through supervision of various student projects and teaching parts of lectures at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology before starting his position at AAU.
Christian Bettstetter brings in his expertise on wireless communications and selforganization in networked systems with applications in sensor networks and mobile robotics. He has been professor at the University of Klagenfurt since 2005, where he leads the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems. He is also founding scientific director of Lakeside Labs GmbH, a nonprofit research company focusing on self-organizing networked systems. Junior staff members of Lakeside Labs may also joint the KPK with own Lakeside Labs funding. Before joining Klagenfurt, Bettstetter was a research and teaching staff member in electrical and information engineering at Technische Universität München (TUM) and senior researcher at DOCOMO Euro-Labs. He is among the most-cited scientists at AAU: Two of his papers have been cited about 1.000 times; his current h-index is 36; he received two best paper awards from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society and one from the German ITG.
Hermann Hellwagner has been a full professor at AAU since 1998, leading the Multimedia Communications group. His research areas are distributed multimedia systems, multimedia data communication, and the use of multimedia in challenged networks, e.g., among aerial robots and in emergency response situations. Earlier, he held positions as an associate professor at the University of Technology in Munich and as a senior researcher at Siemens Corporate Research in Munich. He has received many research grants from national (Austria, Germany) and European funding agencies as well as from industry. For many years, his research group has actively contributed to multimedia standardization within the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG { ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11).
Bernhard Rinner is a full professor at the Alpen-Adria-Universitat Klagenfurt where he is heading the Pervasive Computing group. Before joining Klagenfurt he was with Graz University of Technology and held research positions at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 and 1998/99. His current research interests include sensor networks, multi-robot systems and pervasive computing. He has authored and co-authored more than 200 papers for journals, conferences and workshops, has led many research projects and has served as reviewer, program committee member, program chair and editor-in-chief. Bernhard Rinner is national speaker of the Erasmus Mundus doctoral school on Interactive and Cognitive Environents (ICE), chair of the doctoral advisory board of the Faculty of Technical Sciences and member of the board of the Austrian Science Fund.
Additional Faculty
While the above core faculty builds a strong foundation of the KPK, the program will actively involve other faculty members at AAU to broaden the perspectives of the participating researchers through all levels. The KPK generally seeks inputs and synergies across all researchers at AAU and internationally. At AAU, we speci cally identi ed the following people who expressed their interest in the KPK and its research and teaching focus:
Prof. Wilfried Elmenreich is an expert in smart grids and self-organizing systems. His knowledge in these elds perfectly complements the expertise in organizing multiple aerial vehicles in an autonomous and self-organizing fashion to ful ll best a given task.
Prof. Gerhard Friedrich is an expert in knowledge-based systems, knowledge acquisition, diagnosis and repair of processes as well as self-healing services. His expertise will add to the health and state monitoring of the swarm such that corrective actions can be de ned autonomously and executed at agent level to swarm level.
Prof. Barbara Kaltenbacher is an expert in mathematical modelling and optimization. Her profound theoretical knowledge of mathemtical system analysis will greatly support the KPK members to focus on theoretical soundness before validating their ndings with real systems.
Prof. Martin Pinzger is an expert in software engineering with a focus on software quality, software design, and empirical studies in software engineering. His expertise in handling complex software structures and their analysis will greatly contribute to the design of robust, scalable, fail-safe swarm algorithms for the aerial network. The robustness of these complex software structures is particularly important so we can test our theoretical ndings on real systems.
Prof. Franz Rendl is an expert in mathematical optimization, operations research, algorithms and heuristics for hard problems, and complexity of algorithms. His advice and contributions will ensure thorough mathematical formulation and ecient solutions of various optimization problems that will emerge in data communications, for instance.
Prof. Andrea Tonello is an expert in distributed signal processing and communication channel analysis. The communication abilities between the aerial devices will play a crucial decision factor for self-organizing and distributed tasks. Tonello’s expertise in the potentially automated analysis of these factors will allow improved unsupervised reasoning of the swarm.
Prof. Friederike Wall is an expert in agent based simulations, information quality and validation, and agent based decision behavior analysis in the field of controlling and strategic business management. This perspective will open new angles of view to the problems in an autonomous aerial swarm and has great potential to foster ground-breaking new approaches in this domain.
International Faculty
A key strength of this KPK is its international research network and focus on collaborative research at international level. These are the international experts who have agreed to serve as external examiners and additional advisors of PhD theses, or who are generally interested in participating in this KPK with research personnel exchanges at the senior or student level.
- Prof. Ian Akyildiz (Broadband Wireless Networking Lab, GeorgiaTech, USA)
- Dr. Roland Brockers (Computer Vision Group, NASA-JPL, USA)
- Prof. Timothy X Brown (Electrical & Computer Engineering, CMU, USA)
- Dr. Sheng-Wei Chen (Inst. of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
- Prof. Lajos Hanzo (Communications Group, University of Southampton, UK)
- Prof. Cheng-Hsin Hsu (Dept. of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua Univ., Taiwan)
- Prof. Vijay Kumar (Robotics GRASP Lab, UPenn, USA)
- Prof. Jon Lee (Industrial and Operations Engineering, U-Mich, USA)
- Prof. Nathan Michael (The Robotics Institute, CMU, USA)
- Prof. Nicholas Roy (Robust Robotics Group, MIT, USA)
- Prof. Daniela Rus (Distributed Robotics Lab, MIT, USA)
- Prof. Angela Schollig (Dynamic Systems Lab, University of Toronto, CA)
- Prof. Margarita Chli (Vision for Robotics Group, ETHZ, CH)
- Prof. Ruedi Stoop (Institute of Neuro Informatics, ETHZ, CH)
- Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme (Robotics Research Lab, USC, USA)
- Prof. John Thompson (Digital Communications, University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Prof. Jorg Widmer (IMDEA Networks Institute, Spain)
- Prof. Xin Yao (Natural Computation Group, University of Birmingham, UK
Besides these international connections, the KPK involves internationally renowned scientists at research institutions within Austria. Speci cally involved are: Prof. Horst Bischof (Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision, TU Graz), Dr. Evsen Yanmaz (Lakeside Labs GmbH), Dr. Martin Humenberger (AIT), and Dr. Michael Hofbaur (Joanneum Research).
