08/04/2025 Professor Christos Verginis from Uppsala University in Sweden has been visiting us this week. His work focuses on multirobot systems and control theory. It was a great time for many discussions and future collaborations.
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28/03/2025 You should really consider joining us. Nice group lunch in the village of La Herradura, Granada.
31/01/2025 Today we were collecting data from our air-to-air network for relative localization!
28/01/2025 We are pleased to announce that two papers co-authored with our collaborators on guiding vector fields for drone systems have been accepted for presentation at ICRA 2025.
- "Inverse Kinematics on Guiding Vector Fields for Robot Path Following" by Yu Zhou, Jesús Bautista Villar, Weijia Yao, Gang Zheng, Andrey Polyakov, and Hector Garcia de Marina.
-"Distributed Versatile Maneuvering with Generalized Formations Using Guiding Vector Fields" by Yang Lu, Sha Luo, Pengming Zhu, Weijia Yao, Hector Garcia de Marina, Xinglong Zhang, and Xin Xu.
16/12/2024 Jesús presented our paper at CDC in Milan titled Resilient source seeking with robot swarms. Full packed room! And a lot of discussions and potential collaborations afterward!
06/12/2024 Professor Heiko Hamann from the University of Konstanz, who is specialized in robot swarms, is visiting us for two weeks! He gave an inspiring talk on swarm robotics; it was very interesting to know about how adding more robots to the network can decrease the performance of the team, and how hysteresis plays a role in order to remove robots and recover the original performance of the swarm.
Of course, we took him to the field and show him some demos with our aircraft :P.
25/11/2024 Héctor participated in the Symposium on Localization and Cooperative Control of Intelligent Systems at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. We were revisiting how rigidity and other strategies in formation control can assist with current open problems in robotics. It was great to meet with old friends again!
24/11/2024 Héctor was invited to give a plenary talk at the second edition of ARTS (Autonomous Robotic Technology Seminar) in Shenzhen, China. This is a forum where young researchers in robotics gather to exchange experiences and update our community (around 1000 attendees!) with our latest results.
20/11/2024 Héctor gave a talk at the II Andalucía AI Congress on Practical Challenges in Robot Swarms. The audience was highly diverse, including people from academia, industry, the military, and ordinary citizens who were eager to learn what a robot swarm truly is.
We even made to the news!
01/09/2024 Eduardo Montijano and David Morilla from the University of Zaragoza were visiting our lab. We were discussing how to integrate active perception to our drones, and how to enhance our distributed algorithms with dynamics consensus algorithms.
In the photo, we took our guests to fly our drones and demonstrate the effectiveness of our 3D guiding vector fields for fixed-wing drones.
20/08/2024 We have a visitor! Yu Zhuo from INRIA, Lille, France. He is a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Andrey Polyakov and Gang Zheng, and his research is on Guiding Vector Fields for autonomous vehicles. During his visit, we will integrate some of this work into our UAVs.
In the photo, we were flying over a nearby lake taking scientific data over a calibrated weather station so a team of physicists can estimate the local wind field.
08/07/2024 Our work Resilient source seeking with robot swarms by A. Acuaviva, J. Bautista, W. Yao, J. Jiménez, HG de Marina has been accepted in the 63rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2024!
The next step is the journal version with real robots! In fact, today we have started the first experiments with three rovers in a purely swarm setup.
08/07/2024 Héctor was presenting our work on source seeking for robot swarms in two workshops at the European Control Conference in Stockholm.
Workshop on Advanced sensory-based estimation and control of autonomous vehicles.
Workshop on Task and Motion Coordination under Geometric, Dynamic and Temporal Constraints.
Many thanks to the organizers for the invitation and the attendees for their interest!
Conference paper: Resilient source seeking with robot swarms
08/07/2024 Our work on how to coordinate unicycles without orientation measurements has been accepted for publication! We prove rigorously intuitive results; as we can see in the figure, the vehicles' alignments are under control if you control distance-rigid formations of moving unicycles using only relative positions.
J. Chen, B. Jayawardhana, HG de Marina. Distributed Distance-based Formation-Motion Control of Unicycle Agents without Orientation Measurements. To appear in Transactions on Control of Network Systems. 2024.
28/06/2024 Jesús and Héctor have written a tutorial for aligning 3D unicycles with partially known vector fields using geometric controllers. We have digested concepts that are not so common in robotics with very explicit examples. This technical note aims to introduce geometric controllers to roboticists bridging some gaps between theory and practice.
Tutorial: SO(3) attitude controllers and the alignment of robots with non-constant 3D vector fields.
20/05/2024 We are back from ICRA 2024 in Yokohama!
Jesús presented our work titled Behavioral-based circular formation control for robot swarms.
20/05/2024 Journal paper accepted! Our work titled Scaling up the formation of agents with heterogeneous sensing: mixed distance and bearing-only by J. Chen, B. Jayawardhana and HG de Marina will be published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
In this work, we show a systematic method on how to scale up a formation control network whose agents control different geometric properties between their neighbors.
Congrats Jin for the hard and eventually very rewarding work!
13/04/2024 Héctor was visiting the Science of Intelligence Institute in Berlin mainly joined by researchers from Technische Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Héctor gave a talk about the practical challenges that swarm robotics are facing from the perspective of control engineering.
26/02/2024 Héctor was visiting the University of Zaragoza and its Robotics, Perception and Real Time Group. He met many robotics colleagues and exchanged many interesting ideas! He also gave a talk about swarm robotics (we could not tell). It was really productive, and some interesting collaborations emerged regarding our ERC project.
23/02/2024 Today, we tested new adjustments in the altitude controller of our aircraft. It is astonishing to check that in a 3D trajectory (ellipse, 60m peak, 40m low) our vertical controller kept the error between +-2meters! (plot above).
We have tested the XY controller, and now our horizontal errors are less than 0.5 meters! (plot below).
These results were achieved with today's 30km/h winds with an aircraft weighing less than one kilo!
13/02/2024 Our lab was invited to introduce what is the (drone) swarm technology and its state-of-the-art to the Spanish Army. The (four stars) general of the Spanish Army attended our presentation!
01/01/2024 The ERC Starting Grant project starts! 5 years ahead!
17/12/2023 Our friends from CanalSur (Spanish TV from Andalucia) made a reportage about our research on swarm robotics! In this video, we explain the concept of a robot swarm and what are the applications of swarms of drones in the real world.
13/10/2023 Jin, a Ph.D. student from the University of Groningen, is visiting us this October. We are exploring with him a novel approach in formation control. We call it cloud-based formation control! Stay tuned for the details :P. In the meantime, we have taken Jin to fly to our club. It seems he had a good time there. Maybe you can spot him in the video.
30/09/2023 (OPEN POSITIONS!) We have opened a Ph.D. position within our ERC project Controlling imperfect robot swarms. We are also interested in hosting FPU candidates at our lab. If you are interested or you know somebody who is a good match; please, check out the following link https://sites.google.com/view/hgdemarina/open-positions .
In addition, we offer Master and Bachelor projects within our lab; please, check out the following link https://sites.google.com/view/hgdemarina/masterbachelor-projects .
12/09/2023 oMg! The ERC contacted me this morning. My proposal titled Controlling imperfect robot swarms got awarded with the Starting Grant! Huge!
21/07/2023 The 2023 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems was a huge success! Students were engaged, invited lecturers had an outstanding level, and the city of Prague is certainly beautiful. Thanks again for such a nice invitation!
17/04/2023 I was invited to give a lecture at the 2023 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems together with other researchers like Dario Floreano and Javier Alonso-Mora, organized by the Czech Technical University (CTU) in Prague.
I will present my latest results on source-seeking with resilient robot swarms. Hope to see you there!
17/04/2023 First maiden flight for Jesús! There is always a first time, and he was an excellent ground-mission controller!
We flew an Opterra 1.2m successfully and collected the necessary
flight data for its trimming in the lab later on.
22/01/2023 Congratulations Jin! We had an accepted paper in the American Control Conference on..... of course, formation control :P. The title of the article is Distance-based Formation-Motion Control for Unicycle Agents written by Jin Chen (Ph.D. student in Groningen), Bayu Jawardhana, and me. In this article Jin provides answers to some open questions, such as the exponential converge, of a team of unicycles following distance-based formation controllers with velocity tracking.
5/12/2022 I gave a talk on swarm robotics and formation control at the Beijing University of Technology. Hopefully, next time it will be in person :P.
1/12/2022 From now on, this is not a personal webiste but the site of Swarm Systems Lab :P.
15/11/2022 The ERC just informed me that they propose my Starting Grant for funding (maximum score, A, yei!). However, I am in the reserve list :S. Who knows whether the list will catch me after the UK not being part of the program this year either.
26/10/2022 Changing the mood, I would like to introduce you to our fantastic facilities for our flights at RC Club ciudad de la Alhambra. Astonishing landscape with mountains, lots of space to fly, and clear runaways. I feel very fortunate to be part of this club!
21/10/2022 The matured work from our paper nominated for the best paper award in ICRA has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Robotics! In this work, we show how to coordinate distributely teams of robots on 3D surfaces with strong converge guarantees.
As usually, we provide real experiments with aircraft, and the implementation is ready for the general public in our open-source project for autopilots Paparazzi.
09/08/2022 We were working with Haiwen Wu (Ph.D. student in Groningen) on the application of formation control techniques to arm manipulators. He conducted a very detailed analysis on to apply different distance and position-based control to arm manipulators with uncertainities in their parameters. Our results can be found in our accepted paper Distributed formation control for manipulator end-effectors, to be published in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control journal.
01/07/2022 Congratulations Adam! Our (former) Ph.D. student made it to IROS 2022. Our paper titled Energy-Aware Planning-Scheduling for Autonomous Aerial Robots exploits typical periodic patterns in survey missions to optimize the energy consumption of a UAV.
22/05/2022 Our paper on formation control and maneuvering with title Maneuvering Angle Rigid Formations with Global Convergence Guarantee by Liangming Chen as main author has been accepted for publication in the IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica!
06/05/2022 I was invited to give a talk by the control engineering group at Cambridge University. This talk belongs to a series of seminars devoted to control theory topics. It will be held on the 30th of June, it is online, and if you are interested you can find more information here.
24/12/2021 It is official now. From the 1st of April, I will start as a Ramon y Cajal researcher at the University of Granada, in the beautiful city of Granada. As principal investigator, I will continue focusing on autonomous mobile robots and robot swarms.
20/11/2021 Our new team member Jesús has ported Paparazzi, the opensource autopilot, to off-road rovers! A new firmware has been programmed, and it has been made compatible with the guidance from the Guiding Vector Fields that has worked wonderfully for our planes. Next step is to build more copies for our heterogeneous robot swarm.
05/08/2021 I have been awarded the Ramón y Cajal grant! That is (arguably) the most prestigious Spanish grant for young investigators, and it guarantees five years of independent research funded by the Spanish government. It is an excellent opportunity to think and organize the following steps on my research on swarm robotics.
03/08/2021
The first copy for my aerial swarm had a successful maiden flight! In fact, this is my first autonomous flight at my new club in Arroyomolinos. Nice to be licensed to fly aeromodels again.
The aircraft is a Sonicmodell AR.Wing 900 geared with Paparazzi, the open-source autopilot.
01/08/2021
I was appointed as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. I am very excited to serve for the flagship journal of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, one the top robotics publications in the world.
28/07/2021 Our works in formation control has been positively welcomed in the 60th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2020! The first work, with Haiwen as first author, we explore formation control algorithms applied to arm manipulators Distributed formation control of manipulators' end-effector with internal model-based disturbance rejection. The second work, we explore how to induce collective motions in affine formation control Leaderless collective motions in affine formation control.
23/04/2021 We were contacted by the ICRA's organization today. Our submission Distributed coordinated path following using guiding vector fields has been nominated for the BEST PAPER AWARD together with other three finalists! There were 4005 submission, and only four were selected among 1946 accepted works. The authors of this paper are Weijia Yao (University of Groningen), myself (University Complutense of Madrid), Zhiyong Sun (TU Eindhoven), and Ming Cao (University of Groningen). Congrats!
28/02/2021 Our only submission to ICRA has been accepted! Our work titled Distributed coordinated path following using guiding vector fields shows how to guarantee formally the global convergence of a team of agents to a desired path in arbitrary dimensions and with a desired inter-agent configuration. Experiments with two fixed-wings and simulations with hundreds of agents show appealing applications for formation flights and volume coverage.
27/11/2020 My colleague Leonardo Colombo and I have received good news about our paper titled Forced Variational Integrators for the Formation Control of Multi-Agent Systems. It has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems! In this work, we explore the applications of Variational Integrators for large simulations in multi-agent systems. We show how to save simulation time and have more accurate numerical results than traditional integration methods such as Runge-Kutta.
06/11/2020 Today, we have been informed that our paper titled Singularity-free Guiding Vector Field for Robot Navigation has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Robotics in the first round of reviews! In this work, we (with Weijia Yao from Groningen as main author) show how to construct guiding fields for robots with complex dynamics to track non-trivial paths, e.g., self-intersected 3D ones. The implementation is ready for its exploitation in the open-source project Paparazzi for fixed-wing aircraft.
13/10/2020 Our paper titled Maneuvering formations of mobile agents using designed mismatched angles has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. In this work, Liangming Chen from the University of Groningen explores and analyzes how formations can be maneuvered by adding mismatches to the interior angles to be controlled.
16/09/2020 My solo-authored paper titled Distributed formation maneuver control by manipulating the complex Laplacian has been accepted in Automatica!
01/09/2020 This one is special for me since my first contact with control and aeronautics was in the high school when I read for the first time an issue of the Journal of Guidance , Control, and Dynamics. I am very happy to announce that our work titled Collaborative target-tracking control using multiple autonomous fixed-wing UAVs with constant speeds has been accepted in the mentioned journal!
09/08/2020 My first solo-authored paper titled Maneuvering and robustness issues in undirected displacement-consensus-based formation control has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. In this article, I study the impact of non-perfect sensing on the distributed formation control of agents.
16/07/2020 We have two accepted works in CDC 2020! One is our already accepted article Angle-Constrained Formation Control for Circular Mobile Robots, and the second one is a joint work with the guys in Groningen, Mobile Robot Path Following Control in 2D Using a 3D Guiding Vector Field: Singularity Elimination and Global Convergence.
26/05/2020 Our article titled Angle-Constrained Formation Control for Circular Mobile Robots has been accepted in IEEE Control Systems Letters. Nelson made a fantastic job formalizing the relation between bearing-based and distance-based formation control.
01/04/2020 I start as a research fellow at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid under the program Atracción de Talento cofunded by the goverment of the Autonomous Community of Madrid. I will continue my research in multi-agent systems and robotics in the Deparment of Computer Architecture and Automatic Control at the Faculty of Physics in Madrid.
27/02/2020 Our paper titled Forced variational integrator for distance-based shape control with flocking behavior of multi-agent systems has been accepted at IFAC World Congress 2020, Berlin! This was a joint work with the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT) in Spain, and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
13/12/2019 My colleague Leonardo Colombo will present our joint work On the observability of relative positions in left-invariant multi-agent control systems and its application to formation control at CDC on Friday afternoon in the regular session Cooperative Control I.
21/09/2019 I am honored to join the International IMAV Comittee! IMAV is a competition and conference event on Mini and Micro Aerial Vehicles that was born in Europe in 2009. After several consecutive years held in Europe, IMAV aimed to be spread worldwide starting in Beijing 2016. IMAV currently gather around 200 researcher all over the world to demonstrate their capabilities for fulfilling new challenges in drone autonomous missions.
28/08/2019 Ewoud Smeur from Technical University of Münich was visiting us. We completed the first autonomous flight with Paparazzi at the H.C. Andersen airport!
20/07/2019 Our paper titled On the observability of relative positions in left-invariant multi-agent control systems and its application to formation control has been accepted at CDC 2019, Paris! This was a joint work with the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT) in Spain.
19/07/2019 I was invited to give the talk Building the bridge between mathematical engineering and swarm robotics at ICIAM (International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics) in Valencia.
27/06/2019 Welcome to my new personal website!
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