David Portugal

Frederico C. Vaz, David Portugal, André Araújo et al.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have the ability to operate in harsh underwater environments without endangering human lives in the process. Nevertheless, just like their ground and aerial counterparts, AUVs need to be able to estimate their own position. Yet, unlike ground and aerial robots, estimating the pose of AUVs is very challenging, with only a few high-cost technological solutions available in the market. In this paper, we present the development of a realistic underwater acoustic model, implemented within the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Gazebo simulator framework, for localization of AUVs using a set of water surface robots, time of flight of underwater propagated acoustic waves, and a multilateration genetic algorithm approach.

David Portugal, Luís Santos, Pedro Trindade et al.

SocialRobot is a collaborative European project, which focuses on providing a practical and interactive solution to improve the quality of life of elderly people. Having this in mind, a state of the art robotic mobile platform has been integrated with virtual social care technology to meet the elderly individual needs and requirements, following a human centered approach. In this short paper, we make an overview of SocialRobot, the developed architecture and the human-robot interactive scenarios being prepared and tested in the framework of the project for dissemination and exploitation purposes.