Friday 19 / April / 2024
Muscat: Oman is set to host its first conference on unmanned vehicles in February 2019, providing a good opportunity for researchers, government representatives and industry officials to discuss how to best use driverless vehicles in the country.
The conference, titled UVS-Oman 2019, is being organised by the College of Engineering at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) from February 5 to 7, 2019.
“This three-day event aims to bring together leading academicians, researchers, engineers, industrialists, and regulators to increase awareness, share views, and exchange ideas and field experiences on numerous aspects of Unmanned Vehicle Systems (UVS), which is a major part of the 4th Industrial Revolution,” said MK Santhosh of the Department of Public Relations and Information at SQU.
“This first event organised by SQU is expected to provide an opportunity for researchers, practitioners, students, and hobbyists to network and enrich interdisciplinary UVS and related platforms and present the most recent innovations, trials, future trends, applications, concerns, as well as challenges and solutions developed and applied in the various fields of application,” he added. “A number of workshops, students’ project competitions, and an exhibition on UVS will be scheduled during the event.”
The workshops and tutorials will provide a good opportunity for researchers and possibly representatives from the industry and government to network in a relaxed, informal atmosphere and stimulate the development of ideas and interests, sometimes leading to collaboration, and joint publications, or allowing interested researchers to explore a potential area of active research.
Focus is expected to be on various aspects of UVS in terms of technologies and applications, to be presented by leading experts from the industry, government and academia. They will cover broad types of unmanned vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned sea surface vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and unmanned ground vehicles.
“The confirmed workshops include the motion control of biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicles, autonomous platforms, wireless communication networks and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) for UVS,” added Santhosh. “Drones: from theory to application, and the internet-of-drones: from theory to deployment, are two other topics.”
In addition, students will be challenged with making their own unmanned vehicles as part of the conference, with this competition being open to university, college and high school students, who are welcome to form teams and take part in this competition.
“The Students’ UVS Challenge Competition to be held in line with the UVS Oman 2019 conference is open for university, college, and high school student teams,” he said.
“Interested teams are invited to design and develop a UVS of their own or use a UVS to deliver a package as close as possible to a fixed destination by manoeuvering over hurdles that will be present in the course of flight or ground path, and return to the command and control centre.”
“The package delivery is done remotely by the UVS Controller or autonomously through an on-board system,” added Santhosh. “Teams can control the UVS remotely or with the cable. The competition will take place in two categories: the high schools category and the universities/colleges category.”
More details about the conference are available on the website https://uvsc.om/.
