The University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) was founded in 1989 as a public university with the objective of providing a high quality, efficient, public undergraduate and graduate education. Its actual headcount is over 1,700 employees and 18,000 students. The RoboticsLab research team is characterized by its object-oriented and cross-disciplinary research in areas that include robots for construction & mining industries, humanoids robots, assistive robots, human-robot interaction, service and social robots, personal robots, intelligent control, computer vision, artificial muscles, climbing and legged robots postural stability. RoboticsLab researchers work toward spreading the use of robots in industrial applications of robotics, participating intensively in collaborative national and international R&D projects with companies and institutions. RoboticsLab is formed nowadays by more than 70 full-time researchers from 10 different countries.

The role of the RoboticsLab of the UC3M in the project will be the mainly in three areas:

• Robotic system specifications and conceptual hardware development. It includes development of the systems architecture, design of mechatronics components of the robotic modules, including propulsion and steering mechanism.
• Robot guidance mechanism and path planning. It include the development of sensor-based tunneling machine navigation (lasers with permanent/removable reference points) and SLAM-like algorithms including object localization and utility mapping.
• Systems integration, with the help of all other partners, including software and hardware, testing in a laboratory environment and analysis of evaluation results for the validation of the efficacy of the proposed robotic system across specific application domains.

Relative Expertise

• Tunnelling machine control and guidance
• Robots development from the scratch
• Software implementation and integration
• Path planning and navigation algorithms
• Sensors data processing and fusion
• Friendly smart HMI

Relevant Projects

• I3CON, EU 6FP project for modular and industrialized buildings´ construction. We were responsible for development the 3D modularization software, fusion sensors algorithms (temperature, light, humidity, etc.), comfort customization.
• TunConstuct, EU 6FP project in the field of tunnels maintenance. We were responsible for the development of special tools that used carbon-fiver strips and special gluing for crack repairing in concrete-based motorway tunnels. The tools was developed to be installed in the tip of the robot.
• iTuneladora, project for the Spanish-based tunnelling company Eurohinca for guidance of the tunnelling machine. We were responsible for laser-based navigation sensors as well as for navigation algorithms that reduced the number of reference laser positioning.
• RoboSpect, running EU 7MP project in the field of inspection and maintenance of motorway and railway tunnels. We are responsible for the robotics system and software integration (planners and 4D visualizations robots, vision, US and laser systems, etc.).
• STAMS, running EU RFCS project in the field of inspection and maintenance of flood shafts. We are responsible of the fixed reference points´ installation using underwater robot and for long-term monitoring of the mine features (water, gas, stability, etc.).