On January 16, CATEC attended the final closing conference of the OMICRON H2020 Project, entitled ‘Old roads, new technologies: intelligent and safe management of road assets’, which was held at the headquarters of the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos in Madrid, organized in collaboration with Infra ROB and Heron EU Project.

Aníbal Ollero during his presentation

The event served to explore the different innovations that this project has made possible in the safe and intelligent management of roads, through five topics: digital inspection technologies, e.g. unmanned aerial vehicles and car-mounted equipment; smart construction, e.g. of bridges and urban sidewalks; predictive maintenance, e.g. using a digital twin and decision support system; intelligent intervention, e.g. with the support of virtual or augmented reality (VR, AR) and robotics; and safe intervention, e.g. V2X communication and remote piloting.

CATEC participated with two representatives in the expert panel dedicated to digital inspection and control technologies. Firstly, the scientific director of CATEC, Anibal Ollero, intervened with the presentation “Inspection of roads and critical assets using UAVs” to present the innovative multi-UAV solution of the OMICRON project, specifically, the ground control station (GCS) for inspections using multiple UAVs, which he has coordinated from the University of Seville. This is a fleet of autonomous drones that allow multi-angle inspections of roads in 50% less time than traditional methods.

For his part, colleague Javier Curado Soriano, an engineer from CATEC’s Perception and Artificial Intelligence unit, then presented OMICRON’s long-range UAV inspection system, Detect and Avoidance (DAA), which minimizes traffic disruptions while capturing high-resolution images over long-distance flights (BVLOS).

Later, Ollero took part in another panel entitled ‘From intelligent construction to predictive maintenance’, in which he debated together with Nikos Bakalos, from HERON, and Javier Prego, from Extraco.

During the event, there was also a practical session in the room with demonstrations, in which those interested were able to use the OMICRON robotic platform with virtual reality technology.