Juan Alberto Besada Portas

• PhD Telecom. Engineering
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Critical infrastructures face demanding challenges due to natural and human-generated threats, such as pandemics, workforce shortages or cyber-attacks, which might severely compromise service quality. To improve system resilience, decision-makers would need intelligent tools for quick and efficient resource allocation. This article explores an agen...

Advancements in embedded systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enhanced the capabilities of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) in computer vision. However, the integration of AI techniques o-nboard drones is constrained by their processing capabilities. In this sense, this study evaluates the deployment of object detection models (YOLOv8n an...

Advancements in embedded systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enhanced the capabilities of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) in computer vision. However, the integration of AI techniques o-nboard drones is constrained by their processing capabilities. In this sense, this study evaluates the deployment of object detection models (YOLOv8n an...

This paper summarizes in depth the state of the art of aerial swarms, covering both classical and new reinforcement-learning-based approaches for their management. Then, it proposes a hybrid AI system, integrating deep reinforcement learning in a multi-agent centralized swarm architecture. The proposed system is tailored to perform surveillance of...

This article explores the use of a location-aware mid-air gesture-based command triplet syntax to interact with a smart space. The syntax, inspired by human language, is built as a vocative case with an imperative structure. In a sentence like 'Light, please switch on', the object being activated is invoked via making a gesture that mimics its init...

Providing a comprehensive view of the city operation and offering useful metrics for decision making is a well known challenge for urban risk analysis systems. Existing systems are, in many cases, generalizations of previous domain specific tools and or methodologies that may not cover all urban interdependencies and makes it difficult to have homo...

Mid-gesture interfaces have become popular for specific scenarios, such as interactions with augmented reality via head-mounted displays, specific controls over smartphones, or gaming platforms. This article explores the use of a location-aware mid-air gesture-based command triplet syntax to interact with a smart space. The syntax, inspired by huma...

In recent years, touchless (mid-air, hands-free) haptic interactive concepts with machines have gained popularity due to their health benefits and accessible feedback in everyday items. In particular, touchless haptics are particularly effective in creating realistic virtual environments. This paper examines the performance and user experience of t...

This paper summarizes in depth the state of the art of aerial swarms, covering both classical and new reinforcement-learning-based approaches for their management. Then, it proposes a hybrid AI system, integrating deep reinforcement learning in a multi-agent centralized swarm architecture. The proposed system is tailored to perform surveillance of...

This article evaluates the use of CLIP, a contrastive language-image pre-training methodology, for analyzing aerial images of power line infrastructures. Companies record videos using drones and helicopters to assess the health status of the infrastructures, resulting in hours of unlabeled video. This study proposes a semi-supervised approach that...

This paper presents a flexible and extensible agent-based simulation model designed for decision-making in the management of epidemics, focusing on infectious disease spread and mitigation measures. The model incorporates the stochastic modelling of individuals movement in various environments, social interactions, and individual attributes, enabli...

This paper presents a comprehensive Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) traffic generation tool designed to create realistic and complex drone traffic scenarios for various operational use cases. The tool’s primary features include the ability to simulate a diverse range of flight patterns, such as surveillance, cargo transportation, emergency response,...

This paper describes the requirements of a flight planning tool for safe urban operations, which may be used to design operations considering flight constraints and limitations. This system is designed to work in coordination with an unmanned traffic management system in charge of distributing available very low level airspace resources among diffe...

Unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems rely on collaborative position reporting to track unmanned aerial system (UAS) operations over wide unsurveilled (with counter-UAS systems) areas. Many different technologies, such as Remote-ID, ADS-B, FLARM, or MLAT might be used for this purpose, in addition to the direct exploitation of C2 telemetry, rel...

Noncollaborative surveillance of airborne UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) is a key enabler to the safe integration of UAS within a UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management) ecosystem. Thus, a wide variety of new sensors (known as Counter-UAS sensors) are being developed to provide real-time UAS tracking, ranging from radar, RF analysis and image-based detecti...

Background and Aims COVID19 worldwide crisis has shown the fragility of usually overbooked hospital care, encouraging improvements on the homecare and remote monitoring of patients. IMUP (Intelligent Manager for Ubiquitous Personal Mobile Care) is a Mobile App developed by UPM to follow up chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients affected with COVID19...

Unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems will become a key enabler to the future drone market ecosystem, enabling the safe concurrent operation of both manned and unmanned aircrafts. Currently, these systems are usually tested by performing real scenarios that are costly, limited, hardly scalable, and poorly repeatable. As a solution, in this pape...

This paper describes the requirements of a flight planning tool for safe urban operations, which may be used to collaboratively design flights considering traffic constraints and limitations according to an unmanned traffic management system. Representative examples of flight planning are described, as calculated by a prototype flight planning tool...

Drone operators, institutions (e.g. law enforcement, rescue agencies, preservation organisms, etc.) and companies (logistics, surveillance, inspection, etc.), are constituting themselves as drone operators, at the same time that increase the size of their fleets of drones. Nowadays, each operator independently manages its drones, on service request...

This paper describes a formal language for describing intent of quadrotor aircraft. The aim of this language is to support the prediction of quadrotor trajectories modelling guidance instructions in a compact and univocal manner, enabling to efficiently share trajectory information by several actors. A trajectory computation engine, translating fro...

Drone mission definition for inspection purposes may require the operator or pilot to manage a lot of specific data. This process is time consuming, and validation prior to the flight is highly recommended to be able to fulfil the mission with the minimum risks and the maximum efficiency. This paper explores the use of wearable Mixed Reality as a t...

Drones are increasingly being used to provide support to inspection tasks in many industrial sectors and civil applications. The procedure is usually completed off-line by the final user, once the flight mission terminated and the video streaming and conjoint data gathered by the drone were examined. The procedure can be improved with real-time ope...

This paper describes a Mission Definition System and the automated flight process it enables to implement measurement plans for discrete infrastructure inspections using aerial platforms, and specifically multi-rotor drones. The mission definition aims at improving planning efficiency with respect to state-of-the-art waypoint-based techniques, usin...

This paper presents a new non-linear filter designed to track targets following a road network, taking advantage of the road map information. The algorithm is based on a Bayesian Multiple Hypotheses modelling of movement process, postulating and evaluating different hypotheses on the segments being followed by the target after road junctions. Then,...

A method includes generating an initial flight context that includes a set of unresolved flight constraints. The method further includes generating a decision tree based on the initial flight context. The decision tree includes a plurality of flight contexts corresponding to leaves of the decision tree. The method also includes expanding the decisi...

In this paper, a complete and rigorous mathematical model for secondary surveillance radar systematic errors (biases) is developed. The model takes into account the physical effects systematically affecting the measurement processes. The azimuth biases are calculated from the physical error of the antenna calibration and the errors of the angle det...

Big displays and ultrawalls are increasingly present in nowadays environments (e.g. in city spaces, buildings, transportation means, teaching rooms, operation rooms, convention centres, etc.), at the same time that they are widely used as tools for collaborative work, monitoring and control in many other contexts. How to enhance interaction with bi...

This paper introduces a fast algorithm that finds collision-free 3D paths for unmanned aircraft in urban environments. These environments are represented by a three-dimensional scenario in which obstacles are vertical polyhedra. This algorithm uses a method to reduce the number of obstacles taken into account in the path finding process. This metho...

This paper presents a novel approach for the generation of an aircraft intent that unambiguously describes the behavior of the aircraft during a flight. This behavior is the result of modeling the piloting strategies used by an automation system, such as a flight management system or a pilot, to comply with the set of prescribed constraints include...

Tracking of a handheld device's three-dimensional (3-D) position and orientation is fundamental to various application domains, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and interaction in smart spaces. Existing systems still offer limited performance in terms of accuracy, robustness, computational cost, and ease of deployment. We present...

This paper explores the feasibility of a contactless identification system based on hand features. The identification solution has been designed to be integrated with smart space applications and relies on a commercial 3D sensor (i.e., Leap Motion) for palm features capture. The first part of the paper is devoted to evaluate the significance of the...

Six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation is of fundamental importance to many applications, such as robotics, indoor tracking and Augmented Reality. Although a number of pose estimation solutions have been proposed, it remains a critical challenge to provide a low-cost, real-time, accurate and easy-to-deploy solution. Addressing this issue, th...

Nowadays, it is technologically feasible to augment an interior or closed room by creating virtual windows. This paper describes a fully functional system designed to virtually emulate a window by using Kinect-based tracking, prerecorded videos, and COTS hardware (standard PCs and Full HD TVs). The key aspects of the overall architecture design are...

This paper proposes the adoption of a set of ground support tools to assist the approach controller on issuing and monitoring spacing instructions where interval management operations are carried out. The algorithmic basis of these tools, based on computing feasible maneuvers to achieve the desired spacing and monitoring their safe execution, is de...

This paper aims at studying the viability of setting up a contactless identification system based on hand features, with the objective of integrating this functionality as part of different services for smart spaces. The final identification solution will rely on a commercial 3D sensor (i.e. Leap Motion) for palm feature capture. To evaluate the si...

Smartphones have a great potential as tools to adapt daily living spaces to the specific needs of its inhabitants. These devices usually host selected content, personal information and useful applications for their users, apart from continuously gathering their context data and preferences. Taking this fact as starting point, this paper describes P...

This paper describes two systems that can be used to obtain realistic random traffic samples in a terminal area: a real traffic analyser and a synthetic traffic generator. These two systems allow the air traffic management (ATM) engineer to gain insight on the traffic structure of the area under analysis, and allow obtaining realistic traffic sampl...

Commercial off-the-shelf gaming devices (e.g. such as Kinect) are demonstrating to have a great potential beyond their initial service purpose. In particular, when integrated within the environment or as part of smart objects, peripheral COTS for gaming may facilitate the definition of novel interaction methods, particularly applicable to smart spa...

The present invention provides a computer-implemented method of generating an aircraft intent description expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous four-dimensional description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A flight intent description is parsed to provide instances of flight intent t...

With the rapid advances in mobile computing, handheld Augmented Reality draws increasing attention. Pose tracking of handheld devices is of fundamental importance to register virtual information with the real world and is still a crucial challenge. In this paper, we present a low-cost, accurate and robust approach combining fiducial tracking and in...

A key issue when making spaces smart is the availability of satisfying and personalized interaction methods, for the user to comfortably manage the physical and virtual resources in the environment. Among the multiple interaction approaches that are nowadays being explored with this objective, gesture-based ones seem to have a great potential. In t...

Pointing is a universal gesture that naturally expresses interest or attraction towards the pointed items. If some 'magic' is added, the gesture may also make these items perform actions. In this paper, we describe a system that enables to interact by pointing with digital or physical controllable resources distributed in a smart space. The system...

The present disclosure provides a computer-implemented method of generating a description of aircraft intent expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A description of flight intent is parsed to provide instances of flight intent, each instan...

The present disclosure provides a computer-implemented method of generating a description of aircraft intent expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A description of flight intent is parsed to provide instances of flight intent, each instan...

The limited efficiency of current air traffic systems will require a next-generation of Smart Air Traffic System (SATS) that relies on current technological advances. This challenge means a transition toward a new navigation and air-traffic procedures paradigm, where pilots and air traffic controllers perform and coordinate their activities accordi...

Pedestrian tracking is one of the bases for many ubiquitous context-aware services, but it is still an open issue in indoor environments or when GPS estimations are not optimal. In this paper, we propose two novel different data fusion algorithms to track a pedestrian using current positioning technologies (i.e., GPS, received signal strength local...

This paper describes a method to define the performance requirements for Airport Surface Surveillance. The key idea is making the performance specification dependent on the underlying sensor deployment and geometric definition of the scenario, which enables its extension to any operational deployment. The described methodology was used in SESAR tec...

The present disclosure provides a computer-implemented method of generating a description of aircraft intent expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A description of flight intent is parsed to provide instances of flight intent, each instan...

This paper describes an improved version of our intent-related hierarchy of formal languages designed to describe aircraft trajectories. These languages allow a complete or partial specification of aircraft trajectories at different levels, and the extension of its features described in this paper allows their applicability to define more complex k...

The transition from the current air traffic management system toward trajectory-based operations requires the synchronization of trajectory information between all stakeholders and is regarded as one of its main challenges. The guidance system extracts from this trajectory a set of guidance targets (GT) to be tracked by the automatic flight control...

This paper presents a new approach for off-line trajectory reconstruction in air traffic control domain. The proposed algorithm, called model-based reconstruction, performs an accurate IMM smoothing process whose parameters are modified along time according to the flight modes segmented from trajectory measurements. Its competitive performance is d...

In this paper we advocate the definition of a ground support tool which should assist the approach controller on issuing and monitoring spacing instructions in an ATC environment where ASAS-IM-S&M procedures are permitted. We describe the algorithmic basis for two potential sub-functions of such ground support tool, which compute feasible maneuvers...

In this paper we advocate the definition of a ground support tool which should assist the approach controller on issuing and monitoring spacing instructions in an ATC environment where ASAS-IM-S&M procedures are permitted. We describe the algorithmic basis for two potential sub-functions of such ground support tool, which compute feasible maneuvers...

This paper proposes a new paradigm for the formulation of aircraft trajectory computation and prediction processes. Under this paradigm, an aircraft trajectory can be expressed at different levels of detail using a set of novel intent-related formal languages. These languages can be used for describing different aspects of aircraft motion or the re...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the improvements in trajectory prediction accuracy that result from enhancing the quality of the input data and supporting models of a groundbased Trajectory Predictor (TP). Focus is on the prediction of continuous descent trajectories where improvements to the quality of TP input data and models have been app...

When designing services to control the behavior of a smart environment, it is feasible to rely on mobile devices as mediators to empower the user and handle his needs and preferences. In this direction, this paper describes a concept for mobile-object instrumented interaction through a system that enables the orchestration of a set of smart objects...

Currently most air traffic controller decisions are based on the information provided by the ground support tools provided by automation systems, based on a network of surveillance sensors and the associated tracker. To guarantee surveillance integrity, it is clear that performance assessments of the different elements of the surveillance system ar...

RSS-based localization techniques are widely used in indoor environments to estimate the position of people or objects. Recent work proposes to combine this localization technique with a dead reckoning strategy (using inertial sensors on the person or object to be tracked) to improve the accuracy of the localization results and, at the same time, t...

Current bias estimation algorithms for air traffic control (ATC) surveillance are focused on radar sensors, but the integration of new sensors (especially automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast and wide area multilateration) demands the extension of traditional procedures. This study describes a generic architecture for bias estimation applicab...

In this paper the effect of different aircraft automated descent guidance strategies on fuel burn and the temporal predictability of the executed trajectory is investigated. The paper aims to provide an understanding of how airborne automation can be permitted by Air Traffic Control to remain in control of the descent in the presence of disturbance...

This paper describes an automatic-dependent surveillance–broadcast (ADS–B) implementation for air-to-air and ground-based experimental surveillance within a prototype of a fully automated air traffic management (ATM) system, under a trajectory-based-operations paradigm. The system is built using an air-inclusive implementation of system wide inform...

This paper advocates the definition of a standardized formal language detailing airport surface movements, taking into account the specific details of airport environment. This proposed specification will be called Surface Movement Description (SMD). The paper describes its use as the representation backbone to share surface movements in an airport...

There are many studies related with airport surface routing algorithms, based on different approaches and with different evaluation methods and metrics. So, the need of performing a balanced analysis and comparison using a common framework is evident. This paper presents an implementation of an evaluation tool for airport surface routing algorithms...

This paper presents a set of new centralized algorithms for estimating the state of linear dynamic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) control systems with asynchronous, non-systematically delayed and corrupted measurements provided by a set of sensors. The delays, which make the data available Out-Of-Sequence (OOS), appear when using physically...

This paper describes a method to enhance current surveillance systems used in air traffic control. Those systems are currently based on statistical data fusion, relying on a set of statistical models and assumptions. The proposed method allows for the on-line calibration of those models and enhanced detection of non-ideal situations, increasing sur...

This paper describes a novel method to enhance current airport surveillance systems used in Advanced Surveillance Monitoring Guidance and Control Systems (A-SMGCS). The proposed method allows for the automatic calibration of measurement models and enhanced detection of non-ideal situations, increasing surveillance products integrity. It is based on...

This paper presents the architecture and the methods used to dynamically simulate the sea backscatter of an airborne radar operating in a medium repetition frequency mode (MPRF). It offers a method of generating a sea backscatter signal which fulfills the intensity statistics of real clutter in time domain, spatial correlation and local Doppler spe...

This work presents a method to estimate and correct slow time-dependent position errors due to non perfect ground station synchronization and tropospheric propagation. It uses opportunity traffic emissions, i.e. signals transmitted from the aircrafts within the coverage zone. This method is used to overcome the difficulty of installing reference be...

This paper describes an ADS-B implementation in air-to-air and ground based experimental surveillance within a prototype ATM system. The relations between airborne and ground systems related to surveillance are detailed, and the prototype surveillance systems and their algorithms described. Their performance is analysed, based both on simulated and...

The convenience and effectiveness of using case and project-based learning in undergraduate courses in engineering degrees is currently a subject of debate in many academic forums. While some lecturers support the advantages of these constructive learner-centred methods independently of the topic, others are sceptical about their use, mainly when a...

This paper describes a prototype implementation of ADS-B in an air-to-air surveillance system. This air surveillance system was defined for an experimental project on future civilian air traffic management, which imposes new requirements over both air and ground surveillance systems. In this paper the relation between the different airborne and gro...

Current and future air traffic is requiring new procedures and systems to achieve a greater automation of air-traffic operations. Particular difficulty presents the automation of arrival air-traffic operations in terminal areas due to aircraft speeds and environment variability into a delimited airspace where multiple aircraft converge. Several pro...

This paper describes a pair of systems which can be used to obtain realistic traffic samples in a Sector/TMA from a given real traffic database. Those are a traffic analyzer and a traffic pattern generator. These two systems allow the ATM engineer to both gain insight on the traffic structure of the area under analysis and to obtain statistically s...

Methods to estimate and correct slow time-variant position errors due to bad synchronization and propagation in Wide Area Multilateration Systems (WAM) are presented. The procedure does not use emitters at known locations. Instead it uses opportunity traffic emissions (from the aircraft present in coverage). The need for these methods came from the...

This paper describes an off-line bias estimation and correction system for air traffic control related sensors, used in a newly developed Eurocontrol tool for the assessment of ATC surveillance systems. Current bias estimation algorithms are mainly focused in radar sensors, but the installation of new sensors (especially automatic dependent surveil...

The fusion center of a complex control system estimates its state with the information provided by different sensors. Physically distributed sensors, communication networks, pre-processing algorithms, multitasking, etc, introduce non-systematic delays in the arrival of information to the fusion center, making the information available out-of-sequen...

This paper describes some key points of a new tool being currently developed by Eurocontrol for the assessment of air traffic control (ATC) multisensor trackers performance. It summarizes the algorithmic foundations of the high-accuracy trajectory reconstruction process used to obtain reference trajectories from recorded measures. These trajectorie...

Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) will require new procedures and systems to achieve a suitable automation of airtraffic operations. Procedures and systems for automated operations are closely related and therefore frequently they need to be modeled in a combined way. Our group is currently employing recent agent-oriented methodological approaches...

Future air traffic is demanding innovative procedures and systems that take advance of new technologies capabilities. Especially significant are new procedures and systems for automating arrival air traffic operations in terminal areas. In this work, we present an air-air negotiation protocol to be used as a new component of the on board automation...

In this paper we propose the use of a weighted least squares estimator to calculate the position of a mobile node in RSS-based localization systems for ad hoc networks. This technique outperforms the traditional positioning algorithms in terms of localization accuracy and robustness to inaccuracy in the channel model. The performance of the method...

This paper is focused on trajectory reconstruction techniques for evaluating ATC systems, using real data of recorded opportunity traffic. We analyze different alternatives for this problem, from traditional interpolation approaches based on curve fitting to our proposed schemes based on modeling regular motion patterns with optimal smoothers. The...

In this paper some key points of a new tool being currently developed by Eurocontrol for air traffic control multiradar-multisensor data processing systems performance assessment are described. It summarizes the algorithmic foundations of the trajectory reconstruction process used to obtain reference trajectories from recorded measures. Example res...

In this paper we describe a new tool being currently developed by Eurocontrol for air traffic control multiradar-multisensor data processing systems assessment. This tool, called TRES (trajectory reconstruction and evaluation suite), will become in a near future a replacement for some parts of current versions of SASS-C (Surveillance Analysis Suppo...

Future 4D TBO will require effective airground data link communication and negotiation protocols. This issue is especially critical in Arrival and Approach flight phase due to the variability of conditions into a short space-time environment where multiple aircraft simultaneously converge. Besides, several subtasks are closely related with effectiv...

In this paper we describe a new tool being currently developed by Eurocontrol for Air Traffic Control multiradar-multisensor data processing systems assessment. This tool, called TRES (Trajectory Reconstruction and Evaluation Suite), will become in a near future a replacement for some parts of current versions of SASS-C (Surveillance Analysis Suppo...

A simple ADS-B data fusion method to incorporate ADS-B data in traffic control centres already operative is presented. The implementation of this solution has low-impact on the system with a quite acceptable performance. The goal is to make the fusion with the minimal intervention on the tracking filter already tuned and tested.

Current standard arrival routes or STARs will require in next years more flexibility to handle the increase of aircraft arrivals and to minimize the related environmental impact applying continuous descent trajectories at idle thrust. To do that, a global optimized 4D trajectory must be followed from the given aircraft position to the terminal gate...