This work proposes the use of a hybrid acoustic and optical indoor positioning system for the accurate 3D positioning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The acoustic module of this system is based on a Time-Code Division Multiple Access (T-CDMA) scheme, where the sequential emission of five spread spectrum ultrasonic codes is performed to compute the horizontal vehicle position following a 2D multilateration procedure. The optical module is based on a Time-Of-Flight (TOF) camera that provides an initial estimation for the vehicle height. A recursive algorithm programmed on an external computer is then proposed to refine the estimated position. Experimental results show that the proposed system can increase the accuracy of a solely acoustic system by 70–80% in terms of positioning mean square error.

The aim of this work is to propose an alternative way for wine classification and prediction based on an electronic nose (e-nose) combined with Independent Component Analysis (ICA) as a dimensionality reduction technique, Partial Least Squares (PLS) to predict sensorial descriptors and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for classification purpose. A total of 26 wines from different regions, varieties and elaboration processes have been analyzed with an e-nose and tasted by a sensory panel. Successful results have been obtained in most cases for prediction and classification.

This work analyses the effect of the receiver movement on the detection by pulse compression of different families of codes characterizing the emissions of an Ultrasonic Local Positioning System. Three families of codes have been compared: Kasami, Complementary Sets of Sequences and Loosely Synchronous, considering in all cases three different lengths close to 64, 256 and 1,024 bits. This comparison is first carried out by using a system model in order to obtain a set of results that are then experimentally validated with the help of an electric slider that provides radial speeds up to 2 m/s. The performance of the codes under analysis has been characterized by means of the auto-correlation and cross-correlation bounds. The results derived from this study should be of interest to anyone performing matched filtering of ultrasonic signals with a moving emitter/receiver.