Our colleague José Manuel González has traveled to Charlotte (USA) to attend the ICUAS (International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems) and present one of our latest contributions to the european project ‘Beeyonders’, where we tackle one of the most demanding environments for autonomous drone navigation: the interior of a tunnel under construction.
During the presentation of the research paper “Navigating the Underground: Tackling Localization Challenges for UAVs in Tunnels”, José Manuel shared details about our custom-built aircraft and the adaptation of various LiDAR-inertial odometry algorithms to achieve robust and safe autonomous navigation.
ICUAS 2025, held from May 14 to 17, brought together key stakeholders from the public, private, academic, and industrial sectors, all working to define the roadmaps for UAS, setting expectations, technical requirements, and necessary standards for their full deployment and integration into national airspace. The conference placed particular emphasis on research opportunities and the future development of supporting tools and technologies to advance the state of the art.
It is worth noting that Beeyonders focuses on developing new technologies to address the needs of workers in the construction sector. CATEC is responsible for the design, development, integration, and validation of various autonomous aerial robots to support the digitalization of construction environments in buildings, tunnels, and roads. This is a European consortium project involving several partners from different countries, including ACCIONA as the project coordinator and TECNALIA Research & Innovation as the technical coordinator. More information about Beeyonders: https://beeyonders.eu/project/
