Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO)

Established in 1997, the Pablo de Olavide University of Seville (UPO) is one of the youngest public universities in Spain. However it has successfully fulfilled the first stage of development, with more than 10.000 students, and now with both effort and vision looks towards a second phase of consolidation and expansion. Despite its relatively short life, it was recently classified as one of the most productive universities in Spain in terms of research. The Systems Engineering and Automation division of the School of Engineering will participate in CONET. The people involved have expertise in autonomous systems, particularly in aerial umanned systems and in multi-robot and networked robot systems, involving teams of robots and ensembles of robots and wireless sensors and actuators networks.

Dr. Luis Merino is Associate Professor of Systems Engineering and Automation. He has participated in several European Projects, including COMETS on Coordination and Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehiches and URUS on Ubiquitous Networked Robots for Urban Scenarios. In all of them, the cooperation between robots and between robots and sensor networks and actuators is considered. His  thesis  has been awarded with the ABB Award to the Best Doctoral Dissertation on Robotics, given by the Spanish Committee of Automation (CEA, Robotics Group) of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). His research interests include cooperative perception, planning under uncertainties, aerial robotics, and network robot systems in general. He has made research visiting stays at the Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Linköping, Sweden; the Real-time and Robotics Group at the Technical University of Berlin, and the Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes, LAAS, (CNRS), at Toulouse, France.

Dr. Manuel Béjar is an Assistant Professor of Systems Engineering and Automation. He has participated in several Spanish and European Projects, including COMETS on Coordination and Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. His research work also includes visiting stays at the Real-time and Robotics Group (Technical University of Berlin, Germany), the Center for Research on Complex Automated Systems (University of Bologna, Italy) and the Nonlinear Control Group (University of Vigo, Spain). He is the author or coauthor of more than 10 publications in the framework of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). His current research interests include modelling, identification, fuzzy logic, neural networks and nonlinear control; all of them in the framework of UAVs and teams of UAVs.