Current Research Projects

Social Drones

Autonomous drones are becoming ubiquitous. Already, drones are in use for research and applications in construction and maintenance, military and emergency operations, space exploration, logistics, accessibility, smart homes, sports and exercise, and human-computer interfaces.

In the majority of current drone applications, a pilot uses a drone to remotely inspect or manipulate subjects in an environment that is not easily accessible for humans. Conversely, there is an emerging class of applications where fully autonomous drones operate in spaces populated by human users or bystanders. We have coined the term “social drones” to describe these. Our current work aims to create knowledge that informs the design of social drones and related systems via constructive design research.

This project is funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation’s initiative for research on “Consequences of AI and Autonomous Systems,” as part of the WASP-HS research program.

Key Publications

Strategic Partners

Human-Computer Interaction for Industrial Tomography

Process tomography images and data come with a high sampling rate and encode complex information. Hence, they are often quite inapprehensible for human perception. On the other hand, the human senses and mind will not be banished from production but stay integrated with its valuable expert knowledge to guarantee safety, knowledge-based control and reasoning as well as intervention in critical states. Integration of non-formal knowledge and presentation of complex image and tomography data to human perception are challenges. This project deals with the question of how to present process data from tomography in time and space to human operator and how to optimize the machine interface for such data.

This project is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 764902.