Fabrizio Schiano

CNRS Postdoctoral researcher

Bio

I studied Automation Engineering both for my B.Sc. and his M.Sc. at the University of Naples Federico II. My B.Sc. thesis was about the Algorithms for the decentralized coordination of swarms of micro-air-systems (MAS) in missions of monitoring of the catastrophic post-event. It was the result of a collaboration between Prof. Bruno Siciliano (Unina-PRISMA Lab) and the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA).
The most important topics covered in my master degree were: advanced control techniques, nonlinear control, system identification, avionics, and robotics.
Thanks to the collaboration between University of Naples and ETH Zurich I was able to carry out my Master Thesis Work in Zurich (Switzerland) at ETH and at Disney Research Zurich. My project was founded by the Disney Research Zurich and the Autonomous Systems Lab headed by Prof. Roland Siegwart.
The title of the thesis is Estimation and Correction of Wind Effects on a Quadrotor UAV.
Since the 1.07.2013 to the 31.08.2014 (13 months) I worked as Wissenschaftlichter Mitarbeiter (research scientist) at the Zentrum fur Telematik in Wuerzburg, Germany. I was involved in different projects but mainly in DEGREEN. It is a project sponsored by the Bavarian State Ministry for Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport and Technology in cooperation with the Fraunhofer ISC Research Center for Smart Materials. The project is about the energy harvesting for a Dielectric Elastomer Generator. I was working together with Kai Schwedhelm on the Control part of this project.
In Wuerzburg I worked for 2 months also on the EUROPAS/BICAS project. This project is about the design and control of an UAV aircraft.
In Wuerzburg I was also in close contact with the Chair 7 of Computer Science and Robotics held by Prof. Klaus Schilling. For this reason, I supervised several students in their Team Design Project for the Space Dynamics exam.

After this experience in Germany I decided to start a Ph.D. in Rennes (France) which lasted about 3 years. During these years I also had the chance to spend 6 months at Boston University under the supervision of Roberto Tron.

Ph.D. thesis

I carried out my Ph.D. thesis at INRIA Rennes, specifically in the LAGADIC team which now evolved in the RAINBOW team. During my work I was supervised by Paolo Robuffo Giordano

The aim of this Thesis was to give contributions to the state of the art on the collective behavior of a group of flying robots. Specifically, we took into account quadrotor UAVs which can only rely on their onboard capabilities and not on a centralized system (e.g., Vicon or GPS) in order to safely navigate in the environment. We achieved this goal by giving a possible solution to the problems of formation control and localization from onboard sensing and local communication. We tackled these problems exploiting mainly concepts from algebraic graph theory and the so-called theory of rigidity. This allowed us to solve these problems in a decentralized fashion, and propose decentralized algorithms able to also take into account some typical sensory limitations.

The onboard capabilities we referred to above are represented by an onboard monocular camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in addition to the capability of each robot to communicate (through RF) with some of its neighbors. This is due to the fact that an IMU and a camera represent a possible minimal, lightweight and inexpensive configuration for the autonomous localization and navigation of a quadrotor UAV.

Other

My former webpage can be found here.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn through this page.

Currently, Postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS, Rainbow Team at Irisa and Inria Rennes Bretagne Atlantique (IRISA, INRIA).

Personal Website