Author archives: José Luis Blanco

Image of José Luis Blanco

Currently he is assistant professor at the Department of Engineering of the University of Almería. Until 2012 he taught as a Lecturer at the University of Málaga (Spain), where he also received the European PhD and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2009 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include mobile robotics, estimation theory and computer vision.

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor throughout the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (and 2)

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor throughout the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (and 2)

Computer scienceRobotics

By José Luis Blanco

We devoted the first part of this article to introducing the problem of motion planning for autonomous vehicles at a qualitative level and to briefly describing two of the most commonly-used algorithms, RRT and RRT* . Next, we will continue getting into deeper mathematical details about the topological structure of the state spaces associated to […]

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor through the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (1)

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor through the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (1)

Computer scienceRobotics

By José Luis Blanco

Undoubtedly, the most popular aspect of driverless cars, autonomous drones and quadrotors are the cool videos we are getting accustomed to seeing around. However, behind each of those spectacular demonstrations there is a large amount of work, both practical and theoretical. In this series of articles we will shed some light on one of the […]

Word or LaTeX typesetting: which one is more productive? Finally, scientifically assessed

Word or LaTeX typesetting: which one is more productive? Finally, scientifically assessed

Computer science

By José Luis Blanco

One of the main goals for anyone in the Academia, for any research group, is to publish the results of their research . Therefore, enormous amounts of time and effort are devoted to producing manuscripts which will be evaluated for publication in scientific journals or international conferences. Being this goal so central to the career […]

Rapidly Exploring Manifolds: when going from A to B ain’t easy

Rapidly Exploring Manifolds: when going from A to B ain’t easy

Robotics

By José Luis Blanco

We will address a recent article by Jaillet and Porta (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, IRI), which reveals new practical applications of highly-abstract mathematical entities. When it comes to robots, we can’t forget that their fundamental goal is always somehow related to moving stuff. Arm robots as those found in the automotive industries are […]

To filter or not to filter, that’s the question…in 3D scene reconstruction

To filter or not to filter, that’s the question…in 3D scene reconstruction

Computer scienceRobotics

By José Luis Blanco

The history of science is full of examples of researchers who arrived at the same discovery independently. Unfortunately, this still happens in this information age, thus technological deficiencies are not to blame for this lack of communication between different research communities. Odd as it may sound from outside, I hold that much of this isolation […]