The automation of the Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) task aims for high levels of understanding of various scenery. In addition, working in unfriendly and complex environments may cause a time delay in the operation and consequently put human lives at stake. In order to address this problem, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which provide potential support to the conventional methods, are used. These vehicles are provided with reliable human detection and tracking algorithms; in order to be able to find and track the bodies of the victims in complex environments, and a robust control system to maintain safe distances from the detected bodies. In this paper, a human detection based on the color and depth data captured from onboard sensors is proposed. Moreover, the proposal of computing data association from the skeleton pose and a visual appearance measurement allows the tracking of multiple people with invariance to the scale, translation and rotation of the point of view with respect to the target objects. The system has been validated with real and simulation experiments, and the obtained results show the ability to track multiple individuals even after long-term disappearances. Furthermore, the simulations present the robustness of the implemented reactive control system as a promising tool for assisting the pilot to perform approaching maneuvers in a safe and smooth manner.

The expansion of electric vehicles in urban areas has paved the way toward the era of autonomous vehicles, improving the performance in smart cities and upgrading related driving problems. This field of research opens immediate applications in the tourism areas, airports or business centres by greatly improving transport efficiency and reducing repetitive human tasks. This project shows the problems derived from autonomous driving such as vehicle localization, low coverage of 4G/5G and GPS, detection of the road and navigable zones including intersections, detection of static and dynamic obstacles, longitudinal and lateral control and cybersecurity aspects. The approaches proposed in this article are sufficient to solve the operational design of the problems related to autonomous vehicle application in the special locations such as rough environment, high slopes and unstructured terrain without traffic rules.

This work presents a novel platform for autonomous vehicle technologies research for the insurance sector. The platform has been collaboratively developed by the insurance company MAPFRE-CESVIMAP, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and INSIA of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The high-level architecture and several autonomous vehicle technologies developed using the framework of this collaboration are introduced and described in this work. Computer vision technologies for environment perception, V2X communication capabilities, enhanced localization, human–machine interaction and self awareness are among the technologies which have been developed and tested. Some use cases that validate the technologies presented in the platform are also presented; these use cases include public demonstrations, tests of the technologies and international competitions for self-driving technologies.

This paper presents a study of how the performance of LiDAR odometry is affected by the preprocessing of the point cloud through the use of 3D semantic segmentation. The study analyzed the estimated trajectories when the semantic information is exploited to filter the original raw data. Different filtering configurations were tested: raw (original point cloud), dynamic (dynamic obstacles are removed from the point cloud), dynamic vehicles (vehicles are removed), far (distant points are removed), ground (the points belonging to the ground are removed) and structure (only structures and objects are kept in the point cloud). The experiments were performed using the KITTI and SemanticKITTI datasets, which feature different scenarios that allowed identifying the implications and relevance of each element of the environment in LiDAR odometry algorithms. The conclusions obtained from this work are of special relevance for improving the efficiency of LiDAR odometry algorithms in all kinds of scenarios.

In recent years, planning frameworks have enabled the creation and execution of plans in robots using classical planning approaches based on the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). The dynamic nature of the environments in which these robots operate requires that execution plans adapt to new conditions, either by repairing plans to improve efficiency or because they are no longer valid. Determining the appropriate moment to initiate such repairs is the focus of our research. This paper presents a novel approach to this problem by using Large Language Models (LLMs) to make informed plan repair decisions during robot operation. Our approach introduces an LLM-based semantic evaluation heuristic that goes beyond the traditional heuristic methods employed in symbolic planning frameworks, while addressing the common hallucinations associated with task planning when relying solely on generative artificial intelligence. Our approach uses the semantic evaluation capabilities of LLMs to track environmental features and forecast hazards. This allows the system to proactively identify dangerous situations and adapt plans more efficiently. We experimentally demonstrate the validity of our approach using real robots in environments where both the environmental conditions and the goals to be achieved change dynamically.