Participants

University of Sheffield – www.sheffield.ac.uk
The University of Sheffield was founded in 1905 and has since been one of the leading research universities in the UK. It is a member of the prestigious Russell Group, an association of the 24 leading UK universities. Within the subject area of ‘Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences’ it is consistently ranked in the top 5 within the UK and top 15 within Europe by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. Automatic Control and Systems Engineering (ACSE) is one of the largest departments devoted to the subject in Europe, with 28 academic staff, 30 research staff, 20 professional and support staff and nearly 400 taught and research students. This is an internationally leading research department with a vibrant culture spanning all aspects of Systems and Control Engineering. Research activities are focused on many of the complex issues of modern life including aerospace & transport, energy & the environment, manufacturing & robotics, surveillance systems and, more recently, social policy. Underpinning research themes are: modelling & simulation, control & optimisation, sensing & actuation, signal processing & decision support, and, of course, systems engineering. Together, these provide a fertile environment for strategic, multi-disciplinary collaborations with leading academic groups and major industrial partners.

Linköping University – www.liu.se
The Division of Automatic Control at the Department of Electrical Engineering consists of 35 researchers specialized in sensor fusion, system identification, optimization and nonlinear systems. The sensor fusion group participates in all three kinds of excellence centers funded by Swedish governmental research agencies. The group’s mission is to mix theoretical contributions at the international frontier with real applications. The vision is to publish applied papers with real data for navigation and tracking of everything that moves, which currently includes cars, aircraft, surface ships, underwater vessels, industrial robot arms, cell phones, etc. The theoretical work of the group has resulted in a range of plenary presentations on particle filtering, fault detection, automotive applications and localization in wireless networks. The Division of Automatic Control is renowned to have an open and friendly atmosphere with an open door policy. All people (PhD students, visitors, professors, etc) are sitting in the same corridor, and have the same working facilities with a state of the art computer system.

FKIE – www.fkie.fraunhofer.de/en.html
The Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE) is the German research centre for designing and improving defence and security related surveillance, reconnaissance and command & control systems (C4ISR). Scientific research is conducted in the areas of sensor technology, advanced signal processing, communications, sensor data & information fusion, information technology, and human factors research. The proposed research topics will be conducted in the departments Sensor Data and Information Fusion (SDF) and Cognitive Mobile Systems (CMS) at Fraunhofer FKIE.

FKIE’s fellows will be enrolled at the University of Bonn and, there, will be supervised by a senior academic. The University of Bonn offers related lectures and seminars and supervises the doctorate process.

Xsens Technologies BV – www.xsens.com
Xsens is the leading innovator in 3D motion tracking technology and products. Its sensor fusion technologies enable a seamless interaction between the physical and the digital world in consumer electronics devices and professional applications such as 3D character animation, motion analysis, and industrial control & stabilization.

Since its foundation in 2000, thousands of motion sensors and motion capture solutions have successfully been deployed for applications such as industrial control and stabilization, health, sports and 3D character animation. Clients and partners include Electronic Arts, NBC Universal, Daimler, Autodesk, ABB, Siemens and various other leading institutes and companies throughout the world.

Xsens’ research department has created unique intellectual property in the field of multi-sensor data fusion algorithms, combining inertial sensors with GPS and RF positioning and biomechanical modelling. Xsens and its products have received several awards and five consecutive entries in Deloitte’s ranking of fastest growing technology companies in Europe.

Xsens is fully owned by Fairchild Semiconductor, an industry icon delivering power solutions for the mobile, industrial, cloud, automotive, lighting, and computing industries. Xsens has offices in Enschede, the Netherlands and Los Angeles, California.

Rinicom Ltd – www.rinicom.com
Rinicom Ltd is a Lancaster, UK based, privately owned technology company specialised in providing state-of-the art solutions for Wireless Broadband Communications, Digital TV Broadcasting and Wireless Video Surveillance applications. Rinicom’s portfolio of products is growing fast; in particular, Rinicom Ltd introduced the world’s smallest integrated COFDM/MPEG-2 miniature transmitter which became a de-facto Industry standard for covert wireless surveillance applications. Recently Rinicom introduced a novel wireless broadband system which supports both “star” and “mesh” architectures and provides superior performance in multi-path and nonline-of-sight environments. Currently Rinicom Ltd employs 27 (FTE) staff, 23 of which are R&D engineers. This high percentage of R&D personnel reflects Rinicom’s commitment to innovation and provision of novel state-of-the-art solutions. Rinicom has a good track record in participating in FP6 and FP7 EU Programmes. To maintain its leading edge research advantage, Rinicom maintains close research links with the leading UK Universities (e.g. University of Leeds and University of Lancaster).

Ericsson AB – www.ericsson.com
Ericsson AB is a company in the Ericsson Group (Ericsson). Ericsson is the world’s leading provider of technology and services to telecom operators. Ericsson Research (involved in TRAX) provides Ericsson with system concepts, technology and methodology, to secure long term competitive product provisioning. The groups participating in TRAX cover research in the areas of access technologies and signal processing, radio network and radio interface architectures, network management, including algorithms, protocols, performance as well as sustainability aspects of wireless communication and ICT in general. Ericsson AB is host of the core of Ericsson Research.

University of Twente – www.utwente.nl/en
University of Twente is a public university in the Netherlands with primary focus on Engineering. Being primarily an engineering institution, University of Twente has considerable experience in training through research. Within the university, the chair HS (Hybrid Systems) of the Department of Applied Mathematics is responsible for TRAX. This chair deals with stochastic system theory and signal processing. The chair has long tradition of working in filtering theory with applications to diverse fields and long tradition of conducting both mathematical/theoretical and applied/engineering research. This makes the chair particularly suitable to contribute significantly to TRAX. The chair HS is member of the nationwide graduate research school DISC (Dutch Institute of Systems and Control). DISC and other research schools in the Netherlands offer high level graduate courses in their respective fields at the national level. It is intended that the recruited fellow will follow appropriate courses within DISC or other suitable research schools. The recruited fellow will be able to use all facilities of the faculty available to other employees. In addition, university library and other facilities will be open to the fellow. The University of Twente is the only campus university in the Netherlands and the university will provide the fellow and visitors accommodation within the campus.

Thales Nederland BV – www.thalesgroup.com/nl
In the Thales Group, Thales Nederland is the “Centre of Excellence” in the field of radar technology. Thales-NL is not an isolated radar developer. At various levels it cooperates with its largest customer, the Royal Netherlands Navy, in order to develop exactly what this ambitious customer requires. Further, the company maintains good relations with various science and research institutes, such as the universities of Twente and Delft, and TNO, the Dutch Association for Applied Scientific Research. The fellows will be hosted at the Business Unit Surface Radar of Thales Nederland B.V. in Hengelo and Delft, the Netherlands. The research department offers all the necessary facilities and the fellows will be part of multi-disciplinary teams with the best researchers in their field of expertise.

University of Bonn – www3.uni-bonn.de
UBonn was founded almost 200 years ago and is considered to be one of Germany’s and indeed Europe’s most important institutes of higher education. As home of learning to over 29,000 students, we enjoy an outstanding reputation both at home and abroad. The Institute of Computer Science (within UBonn) consists of four work groups on: Communication System, IT-Security, Distributed Systems, and Sensor Data and Information Fusion. The Institute of Computer Science is a strategic partner of FKIE.

SenionLab – www.senionlab.com
SenionLab is a Swedish expert company focusing on research and development of signal processing and sensor fusion systems for indoor navigation and mapping. The main product is a software API for smartphones which provides localization to any third-party app. The unique software combines (i) inertial navigation using the smartphone inertial sensors, (ii) radio fingerprinting and (iii) building information using sophisticated state of the art filtering methods. The localization method is extremely robust, and one of the three information sources can be removed with satisfactory performance, useful for instance in an initial radio mapping phase or on iPhones where radio information is not available to third parties.