Fabrizio Schiano

Contact

Email : fabrizio.schiano@irisa.fr
Address : Irisa / Inria Rennes
Campus de Beaulieu
35042 Rennes cedex - France
Tel : + 33 2 99 84 74 49
Fax : NO FAX
Assistant : +33 2 99 84 22 52 (Hélène de La Ruée )

Background and Position

I studied Automation Engineering both for my B.Sc. and his M.Sc. at the University of Naples Federico II. My B.Sc. thesis was about the Algorithms for the decentralized coordination of swarms of micro-air-systems (MAS) in missions of monitoring of the catastrophic post-event. It was the result of a collaboration between Prof. Bruno Siciliano (Unina-PRISMA Lab) and the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA).

The most important topics covered in my master degree were: advanced control techniques, nonlinear control, system identification, avionics and robotics.

Thanks to the the collaboration between University of Naples and ETH Zurich I was able to carry out my Master Thesis Work in Zurich (Switzerland) at ETH. My project was founded by the Disney Research Zurich and the Autonomous Systems Lab of Prof. Roland Siegwart. The title of the thesis is Estimation and Correction of Wind Effects on a Quadrotor UAV.

From the 1.07.2013 to the 31.08.2014 (13 months) I worked as Wissenschaftlichter Mitarbeiter (research scientist) at the Zentrum fur Telematik in Wuerzburg, Germany. I was involved in different projects but mainly in DEGREEN. It is a project sponsored by the Bavarian State Ministry for Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport and Technology in cooperation with the Fraunhofer ISC Research Center for Smart Materials. The project is about the energy harvesting for a Dielectric Elastomer Generator. I was working together with Kai Schwedhelm on the Control part of this project.

In Wuerzburg I worked for 2 months also on the EUROPAS/BICAS project. This project is about the design and control of an UAV aircraft.

In Wuerzburg I was also in close contact with the Chair 7 of Computer Science and Robotics held by Prof. Klaus Schilling. For this reason I supervised several students in their Team Design Project for the Space Dynamics exam.

Research areas

The main goal of my thesis is to allow the autonomous navigation of a group of quadrotor UAVs in unknown/unstructured environments by only exploiting onboard sensors (e.g. cameras, IMUs) and local communication (e.g. WiFi). The focus will then be on the use of vision for environment detection (obstacles, other robots) and for formation control exploiting the notion of bearing formations and bearing rigidity. I spent 6 months at Boston University working under the supervision of Prof. R.Tron. My work at Boston University dealt with the nonlinear observability analysis of a multi-agent system made of several UAVs. This analysis has been used to design a multi-agent Extended Kalman Filter directly on SE(3) to estimate the scale of a formation of UAVs only from bearing measurements. The main research areas are : robotics, control theory, swarm intelligence, UAV/UAS, quadrotors.

Publications

Complete list (with postscript or pdf files if available)

Software

MATLAB-Simulink
ROS
V-REP
C
C++
Java
CAD