Yesterday, Franz and Markus presented the business plan for a spin-off company of the cDrones project at the Build! advisory board. We are happy to announce that the spin-off has been accepted to join the Build! business incubator.

Our business idea for a spin-off company of our research project was awarded the second place in the Build! business ideas competition. Thanks to Franz and all the other people involved in developing the business idea.

Recently our two patents on a construction of an overview image were finally published. These are the patents with the titles “Apparatus and method for generating an overview image of a plurality of images using a reference plane” and “Apparatus and method for generating an overview image of a plurality of images using an accuracy information” by Bernhard Rinner, Markus Quaritsch, Daniel Wischounig-Strucl and Saeed Yahyanejad.

Our paper "Connectivity versus Area Coverage in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks" by Evsen Yanmaz was accepted for IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2012). Deepest congratulation to author!

We were invited to demonstrate the collaboration methods between small-scale UAVs explored and studied in the cDrones project to the Austrian TV broadcast. Two heterogeneous UAVs were deployed to monitor the entrance of the Alpen-Adria Universitaet Klagenfurt. Besides an everyday students life UAVs recorded a discussion of researchers and their industrial partners about used technologies and achieved results.

This video will be broadcasted in programme “Kaernten heute” on channel ORF2 within the series “Bildungsland Kaernten” (“Educational chances in Carinthia”). This issue covers research in the area of Informatics and Information Technologies ongoing in Klagenfurt University.

Today we had a Research Day where many issues were raised. Our team members and master students gave presentations on their progress during the last months. Comparison of picture point calculation algorithms showed that now we can obtain 100% coverage plan with a small number of photos within a short time. Imaging part was focused on infrared (IR) imaging and registration of IR and RGB images. A lot of work has been done on methods to find features on the same elevation level for mosaicking pictures. The colleagues in the work package on Wireless Communication reported on measurements of wireless channel for ground-to-UAV communication. Now planning of continuous missions in a static environment is possible. These presentations and discussions logically lead to plans for the next year.

After long weeks of wating, we finally received our new UAV - the MD4-1000. It's really huge and it is a lot of fun to fly it ;-)

We're happy that our two papers have been accepted for this year's ROSE conference in Montreal, Canada.

We've equipped our Pelican UAV with a thermal camera. The overview image looks pretty much the same as our RGB image converted to grayscale. The main difference is that these images were taken at midnight...