AutoASSESS

AutoASSESS: AUTOnomous Aerial inSpection of GNSS-denied and confinEd critical infraStructureS

Overview

AutoASSESS is a Horizon Europe project focused on developing Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) that can autonomously inspect critical infrastructures, such as ballast water tanks.
The objective is to protect human surveyors and workers from dangerous and dirty confined areas by employing efficient UAVs. They will contribute to saving human lives and significantly reduce inspection costs and time.
The project involves academic partners, DTU, NTNU, TUM, UZH, industrial partners with expertise in UAVs and miniaturized electronics, and ship owners.

The objective can be achieved by designing UAVs capable of performing autonomous contact inspection of maritime vessels. This goal breaks down into the following tasks:

  • Precise Motion and Force Control
  • Collision Tolerant Mechanical Design & Robot Behavior
  • Onboard perception capabilities for Generic Multi-Rotors
  • Improved Control Capabilities for standard multi-rotor commercial platforms to achieve precise 6D force tracking using portable mechatronic modules

For students:

If you are a student at UT and want to contribute to this exciting project, please contact the Principal Investigator of the project (Antonio Franchi) whose contact details can be found on this page.

External links:

Awards:

Publications

Journals: 

  •  A. Afifi, T. Belvedere, A. Pupa, P. Robuffo Giordano, A. Franchi, Safe and Robust Planning for Uncertain Robots: A Closed-Loop State Sensitivity Approach, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 9, no. 11, pp. 9962–9969, 2024.. DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2024.3468088

  • M. Mizzoni, P. van Goor, A. Franchi, Unified Feedback Linearization for Nonlinear Systems with Dexterous and Energy-Saving Modes, IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS), vol. 8, pp. 3494–3499, 2025., DOI: 10.1109/LCSYS.2025.3549999

  • Y. Shen, A. Franchi, C. Gabellieri, Aerial Robots Carrying Flexible Cables: Dynamic Shape Optimal Control via Spectral Method Model, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), vol. 41, pp. 3162–3182, 2025, DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2025.3562459

  • Y. Aboudorra, C. Gabellieri, R. Brantjes, Q. Sablé, A. Franchi,Modelling, Analysis, and Control of OmniMorph: an Omnidirectional Morphing Multi-rotor UAV, Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems (JINT), vol. 110, no. 21, 2024., DOI: 10.1007/s10846-024-02054-x

Conference proceedings:

  • F. F. Nyboe, A. Afifi, P. Robuffo Giordano, E. Ebeid, A. Franchi, Embedded Robust Model Predictive Path Integral Control using Sensitivity Tubes and GPU Acceleration , In Proc. of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, GA, USA, May 2025. 

  • A. Ali, C. Gabellieri, A. Franchi, A Control Theoretic Study on Omnidirectional MAVs with Minimum Number of Actuators and No Internal Forces at Any Orientation, In Proc. of the 63rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Milan, Italy, Dec. 2024, pp. 3571–3576.

  • B. Gerges, B. Bazzana, N. Botteghi, Y. Aboudorra, A. Franchi, Invisible Servoing: a Visual Servoing Approach with Return-Conditioned Latent Diffusion, In Proc. of the 2025 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Charlotte, NC, USA, May 2025.

  • G. Indukumar, A. Saccon, A. Franchi, C. Gabellieri, A Study on Impact-Aware Aerial Robots Colliding with the Environment at Non-Vanishing Speed, In Proc. of the 2025 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Charlotte, NC, USA, May 2025.

  • C. Gabellieri, L. Teeuwen, Y. Shen, A. Franchi, Manipulation of Elasto-Flexible Cables with Single or Multiple UAVs, In Proc. of the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Hangzhou, China, May 2025.

  • C. Gabellieri, A. Franchi, On the Existence of Static Equilibria of a Cable-Suspended Load with Non-stopping Flying Carriers, In Proc. of the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Chania, Greece, June 2024.

  • B. Bazzana, R. Brantjes, C. Gabellieri, A. Franchi, An Experimentally Validated Model of the Propeller Force Accounting for Cross Influences on Multi-Rotor Aerial Systems, In Proc. of the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Chania, Greece, June 2024.

  • A. Srour, S. Marcellini, T. Belvedere, M. Cognetti, A. Franchi, P. Robuffo Giordano, Experimental Validation of Sensitivity-Aware Trajectory Planning for a Quadrotor UAV Under Parametric Uncertainty, In Proc. of the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Chania, Greece, June 2024.

  • F. Zoric, A. Franchi, M. Orsag, Z. Kovacic, C. Gabellieri, Towards Instance Segmentation Based Litter Collection with Multi-rotor Aerial Vehicle, In Proc. of the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Chania, Greece, June 2024.

  • Y. Aboudorra, A. Saini, A. Franchi, Gain Scheduling Position Control for Fully-actuated Morphing Multi-rotor UAVs, In Proc. of the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Chania, Greece, June 2024.

 

Associated assignments