Esteban Gutiérrez gets excellent mark for his Master Thesis, and continues with PhD
Published July 02, 2010
On 31st May, CTAE’s engineer Esteban Gutiérrez defended his thesis on the topic of A Management System for Teams of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (see abstract at the end of this article), and obtained an excellent mark, thus fulfilling all the requirements towards a Master in Aerospace Science and Technology( MAST) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). His thesis supervisor was Dr. José A. López-Salcedo, from Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB).
Esteban joined CTAE in 2007 as a research engineer and has worked in a number of projects involving artificial intelligence and communication networks. In parallel to his projects work, Esteban has been successful in maintaining a steady path of continuous education, including UPC’s MAST, but also the Space Studies Program of the International Space University, hosted by NASA Ames Research Centre in 2009.
CTAE is proud of Esteban’s achievements, and continues to provide support to his current work towards a PhD in signal processing at UAB. His research is being supervised by Dr. José A. López-Salcedo and by Dr. Gonzalo Seco-Granados, both from UAB’s Research Group on Signal Processing for Communications and Navigation (SPCOMMNAV).
While fulfilling its mission of providing R&D developments to private companies, CTAE relies heavily on the expertise of local and international universities, and has developed a growing scheme of collaborations which include:
- Joint PhD research.
- Joint R&D projects.
- CTAE staff regularly teaching at UPC’s aerospace engineering curriculum.
- CTAE hosting student interns for final thesis.
- Hosting student visits to CTAE’s facilities and participating to job fairs at local universities.
- CTAE prizes to high-performance students, including professional visits to Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
- Providing career advice to local students.
A Management System for Teams of Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Master Thesis Abstract
This thesis investigates new schemes to improve the operability of heterogeneous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) teams through the exploitation of inter-vehicular communications. Releasing ground links from unnecessary data exchanges saves resources and alleviates the inherent scalability problem resulting from the increase in the number of UAS to be controlled simultaneously. An architecture based on an aerial Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is proposed for the management of the data exchange among all the vehicles in the team. A performance evaluation of the two most relevant MANET approaches for path discovery (namely, reactive and proactive) has been carried out by means of simulation of two well-known routing protocols: Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV).
Several network configurations are generated to emulate different possible contingencies that might occur in real UAS team operations. Network topology evolution, vehicle flight dynamics and data traffic patterns are considered as input parameters to the simulation model. The analysis of the system behaviour for each possible network configuration is used to evaluate the appropriateness of both approaches in different mission scenarios. Alternative network solutions based on Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) for situations of intermittent connectivity and network partitioning are outlined. Finally, an assessment of the simulation results is presented along with a discussion about further research challenges.