This year’s IMAV 2024 conference and competition will take place from Sept. 16th till Sept. 20th in Bristol, UK. We are in the process of putting together the program, please do come back to this website to see the updates.
Keynote Speakers
We are delighted to announce the first of our keynote speakers as Professor Ulrik Pagh Schultz Lundquist.
WildDrone: The WildDrone project aims to revolutionize wildlife conservation practices by using autonomous drone technology as a unifying platform to monitor wildlife populations, track their movements, and manage human-wildlife conflicts. In this talk Professor Pagh Schultz Lundquist will give an overview of the WildDrone network, research and training activities, the interdisciplinary methodology, and the specific drone-related research currently taking place in the project.
Professor Ulrik Pagh Schultz Lundquist is Professor and Head of Center for SDU UAS, the drone center at University of Southern Denmark. He is currently coordinator of the WildDrone Marie Curie Network and is interested in the design and implementation of aerial, mobile, and self-organizing robotic systems with a focus on the use of high-level software abstractions to achieve safety, reliability, and robustness.
We are delighted to announce Richard Green as a new keynote speakers for the conference.
Enabling UAVs to use tools in complex dynamic environments: Close-proximity operation of UAVs using tools in outdoor environments requires a level of control precision (sub centimetre) and position estimation robustness/accuracy beyond what is currently possible. We will discuss our approaches to solve this by improving multirotor UAV position control precision, especially in windy conditions – and by significantly increasing the robustness/accuracy of visual-inertial position/orientation estimation in difficult environments. Our progress is evidenced by a fully autonomous UAV using tools to prune pine trees, prune branches near power lines, harvest catkins, test power-line joints – and working towards using tools (e.g. screwdriver) in construction applications.
Richard Green has been lecturing in computer science at the University of Canterbury since 2014 after running his own successful software startup in Sydney. With over 200 refereed publications, Richard heads the Computer Vision Research Lab with an emphasis on autonomous robot vision/deep learning (robots/UAVs/underwater robots). Richard has led numerous successful MBIE funded projects, including an autonomous robot-vine-pruner project and an autonomous forest-pruning-drone project, and currently leads a $10m MBIE project for drones using precision tools along with a $6m MBIE project automating vineyard robots.
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