About me
I am a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at UCL working on aerial robotics.
My research addresses problems of control and learning in the domain of highly dynamic vehicles such as
miniature rotorcrafts, and has a strong focus on real world systems.
Before joining UCL I studied at the University of Essex and obtained a PhD
in Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Owen Holland.
During my final years of study I also worked as research engineer at
Swarm Systems Ltd a very dynamic SME to whom I still provide consultancy.
I hold a degree in Telecommunication Engineering form the University of Padua.
For more details on my background and expertise you can have a look at my CV.
Research
I currently collaborate on two research projects (CompLACS,SUAAVE)
under the advice of Prof. Stephen Hailes, Prof. John Shawe-Taylor
and Dr. Simon Julier.
CompLACS:
Composing Learning for Artificial Cognitive Systems
SUAAVE:
Sensing, Unmanned, Autonomous Aerial VEhicles
In both project I am responsible for the system-level architecture and for the operation of
a set of quadrotor UAVs; often this include conducting outdoor flight tests (photos...).
If you are a company or an individual interested in our activities and would like to know more, feel free to drop me an e-mail.
Teaching
For the past years I have been a TA for the following modules:
Publications
These and the associated citation indexes are also on my Google Scholar profile.
Papers
- R. De Nardi.
The QRSim Quadrotors Simulator.
Technical Report RN/13/08, Department of Compter Science UCL, March 2013. [bib]
- C. Luo, L. Teacy and R. De Nardi, S. MacClean, G. Parr.
UAV Position Estimation and Collision Avoidance using the Extended Kalman
Filter.
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2013. [bib]
- S. Julier, R. De Nardi, J. Nelson.
Multi-rate Estimation of Coloured Noise Models in Graph-Based Estimation Algorithms.
Proceedings of Information Fusion Conference, 2012. [bib]
- S. Varakliotis, S. Hailes, R. De Nardi, M. Ahmed.
UAV and cognitive radio technologies in the Emergency Services arena.
Journal of the British Association of Public Safety Communications Officials, November 2010. [bib]
- S. Cameron, S. Hailes, S. Julier, S. McClean, G. Parr, N. Trigoni, M. Ahmed, G. McPhillips, R. De Nardi, J. Nie, A. Symington, L. Teacy and S. Waharte.
SUAAVE: Combining Aerial Robots and Wireless Networking.
Proceedings of the 25th Bristol International UAV Systems Conference. 2010. [bib]
- Renzo De Nardi and Owen Holland. Coevolutionary modelling of a miniature rotorcraft.
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems
(IAS10), July 2008. [bib] Watch video...
- Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi and Alberto Moraglio. Geometric PSO + GP = Particle Swarm Programming. Proceedings of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
(WCCI08), June 2008. [bib]
- Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi, Hugo Marques, Richard Newcombe, Simon M. Lucas and Owen Holland.
Nonlinear Dynamics Modelling for Controller Evolution. Proceedings
of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO07), July 2007. [bib] Watch video...
- Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi and Simon M. Lucas. Towards Automatic Personalised
Content Creation for Racing Games. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (IEEE CIG07), April 2007. [bib]
- Julian Togelius, Simon M. Lucas and Renzo De Nardi. Computational Intelligence in Racing Games.
In Norio Baba et al. (eds.)
Advanced Intelligent Paradigms in Computer Games, 2007. [bib]
- Renzo De Nardi and Owen Holland. UltraSwarm: A Further Step Towards a Flock of
Miniature Helicopters. Proceedings of the SAB Workshop on Swarm Robotics. September 2006. [bib] Watch video...
- Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi and Simon M. Lucas. Making Racing Fun Through
Player Modeling and Track Evolution. Proceedings of the SAB Workshop on Adaptive
Approaches to Optimizing Player Satisfaction, September 2006. [bib]
- Renzo De Nardi, Julian Togelius, Owen E. Holland and Simon M. Lucas. Evolution of
Neural Networks for Helicopter Control: Why Modularity Matters. Proceeding of the
IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (WCCI06), July 2006. [bib] Watch video...
- Renzo De Nardi, Owen Holland, John Woods, and Adrian Clark. SwarMAV: A Swarm
of Miniature Aerial Vehicles. Proceedings of the 21st Bristol International UAV Systems
Conference, April 2006. [bib]
- Owen Holland, John Woods, Renzo De Nardi, Adrian Clark. Beyond Swarm Intelligence:
The Ultraswarm. Proceedings of the IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium (SIS2005), June 2005. [bib]
Dissertations
Organizational Activities
- GLOBECOM 2011, Wireless Networking for Unmanned Aoutonomous Vehicles Workshop (Wi-UAV), technical committee.
Software
QRSim, the quadrotor helicopters simulator that I am developing for the CompLACS project is now available on github under Modified BSD license:
- QRSim quadrotors simulator
Other code that I wrote or contributed to finds place on my github account:
- Jgpml Java library for Gaussian Process regression
- uclrn.sty Latex stylesheet for UCL-CS research note documents
Unfortunately, a lot of other software that I write for my day to day research is not
sufficiently organised to be released; however, if you are interested in any of the code
related to my publications, feel free to contact me.