2013 ITG Awards 2013 for Dr.-Ing. Niklas Goddemeier, Dr.-Ing. Kai Daniel and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Wietfeld

For their research in the field of networked robotic systems, Dr.-Ing. Niklas Goddemeier, Dr.-Ing. Kai Daniel and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Wietfeld received the coveted ITG Awards 2013 by the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft in the VDE at Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin on November 12, 2013.

The ITG Award is being advertised annually and awarded for outstanding publications, in this case for an article in the internationally well-known IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications.

Role-Based Connectivity Management with Realistic Air-to-Ground Channels for Cooperative UAVs: Ad-hoc aerial sensor networks leveraging MUAVs (Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are ideally suited to cost-efficiently explore unknown or hostile environments for example in case of incidents producing harmful gases or radiation. In this manuscript we present results on the investigations of communication-aware steering algorithms for cooperative MUAV swarms. The mission objective is to achieve a maximum spatial exploration efficiency with the simultaneous ability to self-optimize the communication links by exploiting controlled mobility. While our previous work has mainly considered the performance of the Air-to-Air mesh network, in this paper we focus on the Air-to-Ground-link connectivity control. To achieve appropriate communication links to a central sensor data sink even while exploring larger search areas, an agent-based role management strategy is used to provide suitable multi-hop connectivity. The novel algorithms are investigated for static as well as dynamically changing environments. Key results include a detailed realistic aerial channel characterization and network dimensioning analysis considering numbers of MUAVs and density of ground stations vs. exploration speed and sensor data latency.

2014 VDE-Award for Master Graduate - M.Sc. David Öhmann

Once a year, the VDE Rhein-Ruhr e.V. awards junior engineers for excellent bachelor's and master's degrees. Also this year,  the organization honored excellent degrees and continued its active dedication to young engineers. The solemn ceremony took place at the trade fair "E-world" in Essen on February 12, 2014, for the first time. For TU Dortmund, David Öhmann, whose master thesis "Kooperatives Verbindungsmanagement von heterogenen Funkzugangssystemen im Automobilumfeld" was supervised by the CNI and collaborated with BMW in Munich, has been awarded.