Short biography

Panagiotis Karfakis received the BSc. degree in Electronic Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Piraeus, Athens, Greece in 2018, and the MSc. degree in Robotics from Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, United Kingdom in 2021 and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in Robotics and Automation Engineering from the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, as part of the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 5GSmartFact. He has worked for the past years as a robotics engineer in collaborative UK/EU R&D projects, namely the iFROG and ROBFMS projects to provide robotic maintenance and inspection for the offshore wind, oil & gas (O&G) and shipping sectors. He has served as a mentor in robotic competitions and has held educational seminars in mobile robotics. His current research interests involve field robotics, robot localization and mapping, multimodal sensor fusion and wireless communications.

Short description of project objectives

The current state of the research involves work along the technological and scientific viability of an innovative 5G-based localization system for mobile robots. During the first academic semester, outdoor field tests have been performed to evaluate ultra wide band (UWB) sensors, which share a portion of the lower GHz spectrum with 5G devices. We have evaluated the viability for mobile robot localization, in a multimodal sensor fusion setup and have modeled the sensor error covariance with the use of a neural network approach. Additionally a simulation environment has been developed that uses the signal propagation models and the channel information of 5G cellular networks to track a mobile robot in an agricultural setup. A comparative study has been performed with a set of meta heuristics and a different number of gNBs to evaluate the overall accuracy of positioning and prediction time. This work was presented as a poster at the Spring School 2022 which was held by Paris Saclay University earlier in April. Both the above findings have been submitted for publication to conferences in robotics and wireless technologies and pending approval. During the current academic semester, a survey on 5G simultaneous localization and mapping approaches (SLAM) has been initiated and an implementation is in progress for experimentation and further evaluation in simulation.