The three broad research themes are:
Autonomous Systems
The centre explores research questions around autonomous navigation and control, with particular focus on GPS denied navigation, Swarm/Group Coordination, Connected Autonomous Vehicles, Secure & Safe platforms. The centre is setting up a Drone Research Park with the Aerospace Dept as well as a 5G testbed for connected vehicles with the ECE dept. Some of the ongoing projects in this theme are:
- Autonomous Collaborating Vehicles: Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge
- 5G Connected Vehicles : UAVs & UGVs
Robotics
Enabling robots to work in unstructured environments, in a safe and robust manner, is one of the key problems the centre is focusing on. The ongoing projects are exploring learning techniques like demonstration or transfer learning, reinforcement learning etc to train robots. The centre has developed a quadruped walking platform and also has a commercial industrial robot arm for the experiments. Some of the research projects in this theme are:
IoT enabled socio-technical systems
Large scale socio-technical systems involve humans in the loop and managing their behaviour is one of the key research areas. In addition, the centre researches on key IoT technologies for specific domains – like low cost gas sensors for air quality monitoring, industrial IoT sensors, data exchange middleware etc. Some of the research projects in this theme are:
- Data Exchange Framework for Smart Cities
- Industrial Internet of Things
- High Spatio-Temporal Resolution Air Quality Monitoring
- Smart Energy
Additionally, the Centre supports a broad set of graduate level research projects via its annual Student Research Grants.
Since 2011, the Centre successfully completed 34 research projects. An overview is available here.