Asociación de Investigación y Cooperación Industrial de Andalucía (AICIA), Spain

AICIA is a public interest non-profit Association linked to the University of Seville with 43 industrial companies as associates. Its objectives are to boost, guide and promote industrial research, and the technology transfer. The activities of AICIA are set out in a long list of research and development projects (20 international projects in 2005), engineering works, tests, evaluations, reports, analysis and consultations. The group leaded by professor Ollero includes 30 people and has strong expertise on autonomous robotics systems, cooperative perception and distributed systems including sensor networks. The group participated in 40 projects in the last years including 4 projects of the IV Framework Program (DEDICS, INFLAME, FAMIMO, ROSPIR), 3 of the V Framework Programme (SPREAD, EURFIRELAB and COMETS) and 3 of the VI Framework Programme (AWARE, URUS and Embedded Wisents). The group has been the Scientific and Technical Coordinator of the Consortium in the COMETS IST project "Real-time coordination and control of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles", is currently the coordinator of the consortium of the AWARE IST project on the integration of Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and partner of the IST-Advanced Robotics project URUS where multiple robots in urban setting are considered. Furthermore, the group has coordinated the project CROMAT (coordination of aerial and ground robots) and is currently conducting the Spanish projects AEROSENS, SADCON and SIRE dealing with networked autonomous systems and wireless sensor networks.

Aníbal Ollero. Electrical Engineering (1976), Dr Engineer (1980) with honours (doctorate award), Univ. Seville. Professor at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, Málaga and Sevilla,  "Stagiaire" at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France (1979) and "Visiting Scientist" (1990-1991) at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. He lead or participated in more than 60 R&D  projects, including 13 projects funded by the European Commission. He has been the Scientific and Technical Coordinator of the COMETS IST Project,  and is project manager of the AWARE-IST project. He is author or co-author of more than 350 publications, including 4 books, and has been involved in many industrial cooperation projects and technology transfer activities. He is the recipient of  8 awards. He is currently the Vice-Chairman of the Technical Board of the "International Federation of Automatic Control".