Kristian Laursen

CODRONE is a spinout from the University of Southern Denmark, providing autonomous tethered drone solutions for surveillance and inspection of critical infrastructure.

I received grants from the Spin-outs Denmark Translational Postdoc and Innovation Fund Denmark Innoexplorer programs. The programs aim to spin out research-based companies. During the Postdoc, I matured the CODRONE technologies, received entrepreneurship training and business competencies, and established commercial connections for establishing CODRONE.

PhD title: Autonomous Service Drones for Safety-Compliant European Operations. Research question: "How can a systematic mapping between the SORA-based technology requirements and drone technology and methods be established, thereby facilitating a systematic approach to reaching SORA compliance under EU drone legislation?"

As a Research Assistant, I contributed with development, UAV piloting and outreach on research projects at the SDU UAS Center. During the last year, my main tasks were within the HealthDrone project, in which the use of autonomous logistics and passenger drones are facilitated within the Danish healthcare sector.

As a representative for the SDU UAS Center, I spoke about the center's activities and research projects at various events and gatherings, spreading the word of the center. In addition I talked about the center's specialization in Unmanned Aerial Systems Technology, the Robot Systems MSc degree, which I personally hold.

As a student programmer for the SDU UAS Center, I developed software modules for research projects, assisted in UAS experiments and handled various other tasks at hand.

Studying Robot Systems Engineering with a specialization in Unmanned Arial Systems Technology, I learned about the various areas of UASs such as flight controllers, navigation and path planning, safety systems and aviation legislation. Additionally, I got to further my knowledge in the general field of robotics under topics such as kinematics, robot systems and automation, motion and task planning, mathematical modelling and computer simulation. My master's degree also concerned the fields of artificial intelligence, with classic AI, behaviour-based AI, neural networks, adaptive and bio-inspired robots. Embedded systems with programmable electronics, hardware/software co-design, wireless communication systems and motor control and computer vision with image processing, object recognition, real-time tracing of dynamic objects and 3D Kalman filtering.

As a Robot Systems Engineering student I gained wide-ranging knowledge about hardware and software in classes such as: mathematics, physics, electronics, computer science and computer engineering. Furthermore I learned to plan and carry out projects, to cooperate, to solve problems and to meet deadlines while solving problems for companies.