What was the project about?

Air-Cobot was a project I had worked on during my PhD. It was an an "aerospace valley project" with the goal to devolope an autonomous, but collaborative robot to facilliate pre-flight inspection checks for commercial aricrafts. The PoC was done on the Airbus A320. This project was a joint venture between Airbus and other companies in the south of France with the software development spear-headed by LAAS-CNRS. My role here was the design and implementation of navigation algorithms (SLAM as well as Visual Servoing), novel obstacle avoidance methods and creation of a state machine to mimic behavoir-based control concepts. The project also included topics like machine learning (mainly for perception) and and low level BUS management.

After finishing my aeronautical engineering master's degree in Germany, I decided that I wanted to dive deeper into the filed of mobile robotics. Therefore, in 2013, I decided to move to Toulouse, France and work at the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems, LAAS for short, as a research fellow. The lab is part of the extensive French National Centre for Scientific Research-network and one of the most prestigious robotics research labs in France. The thesis was a partnership the Paul Sabatier University.

Initally the scope of my thesis was limited to obstacle avoid, but over time I was given more responsability, ending up providing a holistic navigation stack including behavior-based controllers for: Visual Servoing, SLAM, Geo-Fencing, Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance and many more. If you are interested, there is a wikipedia page and some videos on YouTube.