November 24, 2025, 14:00-15:00 CET
Join YEAR on November 24 for a webinar on UAVs (drones) for civil applications, led by Marco Cella (AIT), Aksel A. Transeth and Bastien Dupuy (SINTEF), and Dries Raymaekers (VITO). Join us for some insight on LiDAR-based indoor exploration for crisis response (AIT); Geophysics and remote-sensing platforms with real-world use cases(SINTEF); enabling tech for autonomous multi-drone operations(SINTEF); and agricultural “drone sampling” for faster, targeted mapping and scalable analytics (VITO).
Sign up for the webinar Here!
WEBINAR OVERVIEW
Talk 1 — AIT
Marco Cella will present LiDAR-based autonomous exploration with quadcopters in indoor environments in crisis and disaster management scenarios.
Talk 2 — SINTEF
Aksel A Transeth will present enabling technologies for autonomous drone operations. In this talk, he will go through main technology components for autonomous drone operations and show examples from projects at SINTEF with relevant technologies, including AI-based task planning, multi-drone coordinated operations, hydrogen-based power sources, as well as mapping and localization. We also show how these technologies are relevant to applications such as inspection and maintenance, search and rescue, defence and security.
Talk 3 — SINTEF
Bastien Dupuy will present drone geophysics and remote sensing for subsurface applications. He will talk about the SINTEF’s drone lab infrastructure, including commercial and custom-made drones, extensive suite of sensors and data processing software. He will show a range of different real-world applications using the drone technologies at SINTEF including avalanche forecasting, snow hydrology, glaciology, soil contamination and CO2 storage.
Talk 4 — VITO
Dries Raymaekers will explore the use of drones in agricultural applications, highlighting drone sampling—an innovative method designed to enhance operational efficiency in drone-based mapping workflows. This approach offers new possibilities for targeted data capture, optimized resource use, and scalable image analytics in agricultural and environmental monitoring contexts.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Marco Cella
Marco Cella is a Robotics Research Engineer at the Austrian Institute of Technology. He holds a BSc in Automation Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and an MSc in Systems, Control, and Robotics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His current research focuses on autonomous UAVs, with particular interests in autonomous exploration, safe reinforcement learning, and swarms of fixed-wing UAVs.
Here’s an abstract from his latest paper. ”This paper introduces a fully autonomous quadcopter developed for the safe and efficient exploration of indoor environments in crisis and disaster management scenarios. These environments are typically partially destroyed, entirely unknown, and suffer from restricted visibility. During exploration, multiple mapping layers are generated and transmitted to human operators in real-time, delivering critical insights into the structure. These layers include geometric, semantic, and thermal maps, each contributing distinct information: the geometric layer provides a precise volumetric layout; the semantic layer enriches this layout with contextual understanding of different structural classes; the thermal layer highlights relevant signatures — e.g., humans — that support timely and informed intervention.”
Aksel Transeth
Aksel Transeth is a senior researcher at the Department of Mathematics and Cybernetics at the SINTEF Digital and has a PhD in robotics and control from the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at NTNU, Norway. At SINTEF, Dr. Transeth works with research projects and business development related to robotics and autonomy. Robotics is a broad area that covers both robot manipulators (such as those found in car factories, etc.) and unmanned (drone) systems in the air, at sea, on land and in space. Dr. Transeth has been involved in and led robotics projects related to various areas of application – manufacturing, search and rescue, transport, applications in space, oil and gas and in connection with the power industry.
Dr. Transeth is co-leading a topic group on inspection and maintenance (I&M) in Adra (AI, data and robotics) a topic group on I&M robotics in a European organization called euRobotics, and an EU network (RIMA Alliance) and Norwegian network (RINVE) on inspection and maintenance robotics.
Bastien Dupuy
Bastien Dupuy is senior research scientist at SINTEF, in the Applied Geosciences Department. He holds a PhD in geophysics from University of Grenoble (France). His research focuses on subsurface characterisation and monitoring with applications to CO2 storage, natural hazards and resource exploration. He is leading the SINTEF drone lab, a research infrastructure gathering COTS and custom-made drones and a variety of remote sensing and geophysical sensors. His recent research specifically deals with snow science and avalanche forecasting using drone georadar.
Dries Raymaekers
Dries Raymaekers is a seasoned R&D professional in Remote Sensing at VITO, where he has been active since 2008. With over a decade of hands-on experience in drone technology, Dries has evolved from building custom UAVs using open-source hardware and software for consultancy projects, to leading innovations in drone data processing and analytics. He is currently product owner of MAPEO, VITO’s end-to-end drone image processing platform, which supports a wide range of applications and user needs.