Alaa Khamis

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals | KFUPM · Department of Systems Engineering

The road environment is changing all the time. Dynamic road events could disrupt our daily commutes causing inconvenience and less safer roads for many road users. Examples of these road events include road accidents or stalled vehicles on the road shoulder that may disrupt the traffic leading to a road hazard, traffic congestion or lane closure. O...

Smart mobility is a wide umbrella for different systems and services to meet various end-user needs such as safety, seamless accessibility, reliability, and affordability without compromising the collective good of the society and the environment in terms of reduced congestion, reduced emission, and sustainability. Emerging smart mobility systems s...

This year marks the halfway point in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by UN Member States in 2015. The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda set a target date of 2030 to achieve 17 goals designed to serve as a "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future." All indu...

Helicopters, commonly known as quadrotors (UAVs), are popular unmanned aerial vehicles. Despite their small size and high stability, they are used in a variety of applications. This chapter presents the fundamental principles for modeling and controlling quadcopters that will form the basis for future research and development in the field of drones...

The road environment is changing all the time. Dynamic road events could disrupt our daily commutes causing inconvenience and less safer roads for many road users. Examples of these road events include road accidents or stalled vehicles on the road shoulder that may disrupt the traffic leading to a road hazard, traffic congestion or lane closure. O...

Nowadays, we are witnessing several paradigm shifts in mobility systems and services. Cities are decarbonizing the transportation sector and are moving from car-centric mobility to multimodal mobility; from restricted mobility in two-dimensional streets to 3D mobility; from rigid schedule mobility to mobility on demand and on an as-needed basis and...

The development and deployment of robotic technologies can have an important role in efforts to achieve the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—with both enabling and inhibiting impacts. During a workshop at the 2021 IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021), experts...

In an effort to reach accident-free milestones or drastically reduce/eliminate road fatalities rates and traffic congestion and to create disruptive, transformational mobility systems and services, different parties (e.g., automakers, universities, governments, and road traffic regulators) have collaborated to research, develop, and test connected...

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus and its disease COVID-19 present an unprecedented challenge for humanity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics may help fighting COVID-19. Potential applications of AI in this accelerating pandemic include, but are not limited to, early detection and diagnosis, massive agent modeling and simulation, data a...

In recent years, deep learning as a subfield of machine learning has gained increasing attention due to its potential advantages in empowering autonomous systems with the ability to automatically learn underlying features in data at different levels of abstractions, to build complex concepts out of simpler ones and to get better with experience wit...

Foundational technologies represent smart mobility’s building blocks that can be used to effectively develop and underpin important new products and services. Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT), Geographic Information System (GIS), wireless communication, mobile cloud computing, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI)...

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus and its disease COVID-19 presented an unprecedented challenge for humanity. Since characterizing COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 11, 2020, the WHO recommends several public health measures to deal with the pandemic such as social distancing, wearing masks, and finding, isolating, testing, and treating every cas...

Evolutionary and revolutionary technology enablers provide the potential of improving existing processes and creating new and sometimes disruptive business models and services. In the context of smart mobility, these technologies may include intelligent infrastructure, connected mobility, automated mobility, e-mobility, micromobility, active/soft m...

Disruptors are significantly altering the way consumers, industries, and businesses operate and can lead to game-changing products and services able to serve low-end or unserved consumers and migrate to the mainstream market. According to The Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen, 2013), disruptive innovation satisfies customer future needs and may prov...

Mobility is the ability and potential of passengers to travel and freight to be transported. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (Flowers, 1998), mobility is a core human right and a basic need and foundation of social, economic, and cultural exchanges of people, businesses, a...

Population shift from rural to urban areas driven by social and economic needs led to massive mobility challenges and several negative impacts in contemporary cities related to road safety, congestion, and emissions. Smart cities consider people and the environment as the central focus for a better quality of life, reasonable consumption of natural...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used in many challenging and diversified applications. These applications belong to the civilian and the military fields. To name a few; infrastructure inspection, traffic patrolling, remote sensing, mapping, surveillance, rescuing humans and animals, environment monitoring, and Intelligence, S...

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus and its disease COVID-19 presents an unprecedented challenge for humanity. Intelligent systems and robotics particularly are helping the fight against COVID-19 several ways. Potential technology-driven solutions in this accelerating pandemic include, but are not limited to, early detection and diagnosis , assis...

Trajectory tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been studied nowadays because it is necessary to design new controllers under different conditions. Severe atmospheric conditions are one of the major problems to overcome according to the path of the UAV. Conditions such as wind speed that can vary according to the weather conditions can a...

Each year we witness several paradigm shifts in mobility systems and services, increasingly so as technology progresses. The future of mobility is people-centric, software-defined, connected, and electric. Now more than ever, it is imperative for current and aspiring leaders in the field to understand the foundations of people-centric smart cities...

Recent research and developments in CloudRobotics (CR) require appropriate knowledge representation o ensure interoperable data, information, andknowledge sharing within cloud infrastructures. As animportant branch of the Internet of Things (IoT), thesedemands to advance it forward motivates academic andindustrial sectors to invest on it. The IEEE...

Cloud robotics (CR) is currently a growing area in the robotic community. Indeed, the use of cloud computing to share data and resources of distributed robotic systems leads to the design and development of cloud robotic systems (CRS) which constitute useful technologies for a wide range of applications such as smart manufacturing, aid and rescue m...

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus and its disease COVID-19 presents an unprecedented challenge for humanity. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help fight COVID-19. Potential applications of AI in this accelerating pandemic include, but are not limited to, early detection and diagnosis, massive agent modeling and simulation, data analytics, assis...

The following study examines how various classification algorithms perform on the problem of handwritten digit recognition. The classifiers discussed are k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN), Single Classification Decision Trees and Bagged Decision Trees. These algorithms were evaluated with the use of information from the United States Postal Service (USPS)...

Essentially, Electricity Load Forecasting is an approximation of upcoming active loads from a variety of load buses before the active loads occur. Also, it is an important factor for power system energy management. Accurate and precise load forecasting can help to reduce the capacity of the power system, to make unit commitment decisions, and to in...

CALL FOR PAPERS: 2020 IEEE / ITU International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Good (AI4G). DEADLINE: Paper submissions are due on 17 February 2020. The 2020 conference (https://lnkd.in/eNiSDiG) will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, from the 4 – 8 May 2020, in conjunction with the AI for Good Global Summit. Conference attendees will e...

A review and comparison of ontology-based approaches to robot autonomy – ADDENDUM - Volume 35 - Alberto Olivares-Alarcos, Daniel Beßler, Alaa Khamis, Paulo Goncalves, Maki K. Habib, Julita Bermejo-Alonso, Marcos Barreto, Mohammed Diab, Jan Rosell, João Quintas, Joanna Olszewska, Hirenkumar Nakawala, Edison Pignaton, Amelie Gyrard, Stefano Borgo, Gu...

We are pleased to invite you to submit Full Papers to the 2020 International Conference of Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (SMARTTECH 2020) which will be held in the beautiful city of Riyadh - Saudi Arabia from 03-05 November 2020

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of re-use, there needs to b...

In Part 1 of this article [2], we discussed artificial intelligence (AI) as an enabler of the SDGs. In this part, our focus is on the role of robotics and automation (R&A) in achieving the SDGs. Since automation has been a core component of technology development for a long time and is the driving factor behind the advances discussed in Part 1, we...

The current fourth industrial revolution, or ‘Industry 4.0’ (I4.0), is driven by digital data, connectivity, and cyber systems, and it has the potential to create impressive/new business opportunities. With the arrival of I4.0, the scenario of various intelligent systems interacting reliably and securely with each other becomes a reality which tech...

We are witnessing a paradigm shift regarding how people purchase, access, consume, and utilize products and services as well as how companies operate, grow, and deal with challenges in a world that is continuously changing. This transformation is unpredictable thanks to fast-growing technological innovations. One of the cornerstones is artificial i...

Keyword spotting (KWS) is important in numerous trigger, trigger-command and command and control applications of embedded platforms. However, the embedded platforms used currently in the fast growing market of the Internet of Things (IoT) and in standalone systems have still considerable processing power, memory and battery constraints. In IoT and...

In recent years, multi-robot systems (MRS) have received attention from researchers in academia, government laboratories and industry. This research activity has borne fruit in tackling some of the challenging problems that are still open. One is multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (MR-SLAM). This paper provides an overview of the lat...

The next waves of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) will open the doors to create machines able to behave cognitively like a super human at both individual level and group levels in unstructured, dynamic and partially observable environments. This may represent a significant existential risk if not regulat...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the fastest growing fields of technology thanks to its strong and increasingly diversified commercial revenue stream. AI and machine learning (ML) particularly form the foundation of many successful disruptive industries we are currently witnessing. These industries include, but are not limited to, autonomous...

Creating a standard for knowledge representation and reasoning in autonomous robotics is an urgent task if we consider recent advances in robotics as well as predictions about the insertion of robots in human daily life. Indeed, this will impact the way information is exchanged between multiple robots or between robots and humans and how they can a...

The fourth industrial revolution Industry 4.0 represents a new paradigm shift from “centralized” to “decentralized” industry relies on cyber-physical based automation where sensors send data directly to the cloud and services such as monitoring, control and optimization automatically subscribe to necessary data in real-time. In the coming years, th...

In this article, different control design approaches for parallel robot manipulators are presented with two distinguished classes of control strategies in the literature. These are the model-free control and the dynamic control strategy, which is mainly a model-based scheme, and is mostly the alternative when the control requirements are more strin...

Keynote speech at Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Applications (RAHA - 2016) in December 18-20th 2016, Amrita University, Kerala, India.

This paper summarizes the results of a domain review conducted within MineProbe project to study the challenging aspects of the problem of landmine and UXOs contamination in Egypt, to survey the current solutions used to face this problem, to gather the fundamental requirements for the technology-based solutions and to assess the different technolo...

This paper presents the design of a locomotion system for an unmanned ground vehicle to be used in minefield reconnaissance and mapping missions. The paper describes the analysis conducted to quantify the characteristics of rough terrain of the landmine contaminated area and its implications on selecting an efficient locomotion system. A comparativ...

Purpose – IEEE Ontologies for Robotics and Automation Working Group were divided into subgroups that were in charge of studying industrial robotics, service robotics and autonomous robotics. This paper aims to present the work in-progress developed by the autonomous robotics (AuR) subgroup. This group aims to extend the core ontology for robotics a...

In real applications, data continuously evolve over time and change from one setting to another. This inspires the development of adaptive learning algorithms to deal with this data dynamics. Adaptation mechanisms for unsupervised learning have received an increasing amount of attention from researchers. This research activity has produced a lot of...

Guest Lecture about genetic algorithms in the course ECE657: Computational Intelligence/Intelligent Systems Design, Spring 2016, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Two guest lectures about motion planning in the course S2016 ECE 486: Robot Dynamics and Control, Spring 2016, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Waterloo. Useful Resources: - Open source libraries: http://ompl.kavrakilab.org/ http://wiki.ros.org/motion_planners http://moveit.ros.org/ - Book: Steven M. LaValle, Planning A...

A talk I gave at Techne Summit (https://www.technesummit.com/) that took place at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, October 24-25, 2015.

Examines initiatives to remove landmines worldwide.

Assistive technologies for blind people are showing a fast growth, providing useful tools to support daily activities and to improve social inclusion. Most of these technologies are mainly focused on helping blind people to navigate and avoid obstacles. Other works emphasize on providing them assistance to recognize their surrounding objects. Very...

Talk I gave in the International Workshop on Recent Advanced on Robotics and Sensor Technology for Humanitarian Demining at The 6th International Conference on Computing and Informatics in Northern Chile (INFONOR-Chile 2015), Antofagasta, Chile in August 24, 2015.

Innovative Sensor Technologies, State Estimation and Multisensor Data Fusion, a guest lecture I have in ECE 750 Intelligent Sensors and Sensor Networks at the University of Waterloo. This talk describes multiplicity, multimodality, mobility, miniaturization, interoperability and accessibility as novel dimensions of sensor technologies. Sensor web i...

The widespread use of robotics and automation in a developing country like Egypt still faces many obstacles. Apart from the high initial cost of adopting new technologies and the macroeconomic situation, there are two other culture challenges. The first is the common belief about the negative effect of modernizing factories with advanced technology...

Talk given in the orientation session of Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) competition that took place at Ain Shams University in February 2013.

Multi-robot systems (MRS) are a group of robots that are designed aiming to perform some collective behavior. By this collective behavior, some goals that are impossible for a single robot to achieve become feasible and attainable. There are several foreseen benefits of MRS compared to single robot systems such as the increased ability to resolve t...

Detection and removal of antipersonnel landmines is, at the present time, a serious problem of political, economical, environmental and humanitarian dimensions in many countries over the world. In order to foster robotics research and its applications in the area of humanitarian demining, Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-free World has been initiat...

An article published by Robhub about Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-free World robotic competition

The objective of this talk is to highlight the different applications of the rapidly emerging field of swarm intelligence in solving complex problems of traditional and swarm robotics.

Plenary talk I gave in Robotics and AI Track at the International Conference on Industry Academia Collaboration (IAC2015). Machine intelligence forms the foundation of many successful industries we are witnessing nowadays. These industries include, but are not limited to, robotics, intelligent transportation systems, assistive technologies, speech...

Keynote speech I gave in the International Conference on Industry Academia Collaboration (IAC2014). This talk provides well-grounded and informative answers to questions like: • Wh t th i f t f lti b t t (MRS)? What are the main features of multirobot systems (MRS)? • What are the challenging problems of MRS? • How to achieve different forms of coo...

The objective of this talk is to highlight the new open standards that can be used to guarantee the accessibility and interoperability of spatial information resources. Different applications of these widely selected and rapidly growing standards are described.

This an ongoing project focuses on building a prototype that assists blind and visually impaired people in their daily life activities. The used technology in this work is based on computer vision techniques. Research is being done in two main tracks, Navigation assistance and object recognition. The system overview as well as the three current mai...

As indicated by renowned global organizations concerned with health statistics, vision disability and blindness have reached worrying numbers worldwide. Devoting all affordable means as to lessen daily difficulties being faced by blind people has therefore become a paramount necessity. Over the past decade, technology has been seeing light under wh...

Emerging assistive technologies, such as assistive domotics and socially assistive robots have considerable potential for enhancing the lives of many elderly and physically challenged people throughout the world. Blind and visually impaired people can use these technologies for many tasks recognizing objects, handling various household duties, navi...

Many researchers from academia and industry are attracted to investigate how to design and develop robust versatile multi-robot systems by solving a number of challenging and complex problems such as task allocation, group formation, self-organization and much more. In this study, the problem of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) is tackled. MRTA i...

Scene perception and understanding is regarded as a major prospect for blind and visually impaired people. To date, there is no system than can completely recover the sight to them. However, various designs intended to improve their quality of life have been proposed over the last years, and have proven that assistive technologies can provide a sig...

Group Formation is the process of deploying agents at certain positions and specific orientations in order to fill a desired area or field while maintaining a specific shape and a specific relationship between agents (robots) within a system. Multi-robot System is capable of solving task complexity, increasing performance in terms of maximizing spa...

Finding a way for increasing the ability to move autonomously is the ultimate prospect for blind and partially sighted people. It is at the same time a challenge for the research community called to adequately answer to such an aspiration. In this paper, we propose a passive system for helping blind persons to navigate in indoor environments. It in...

One of the important issues in mobile robots is finding the position of robots in space. This is normally achieved by using a sensor to locate the position of the robot. However, relying on more than one sensor and then using multisenor data fusion algorithms tends to be more reliable than just using a reading from a single sensor. If these sensors...

This paper presents a market-based approach used for solving the Multi-robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problem that arises in the context of Multi-robot Systems (MRS). The proposed approach is used to find the best allocation of a number of heterogeneous robots to a number of heterogeneous tasks. The approach was extensively tested over a number of te...