Professor Kimon Valavanis of University of Denver

Unmanned Aviation in general and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have seen unprecedented
levels of growth during the last two decades. Projections and expectations on economic impact
and on future utilization of UAS seem to be constantly revised towards higher numbers.
Although military applications were dominant in the past, civilian and public domain
applications will dominate the future, spanning infrastructure inspection, traffic monitoring,
cartography, real-estate, precision agriculture, emergency response, environmental monitoring,
early fire detection and forest protection, to name but a few such applications.

However, the road to timely, orderly and eventually complete integration of unmanned aviation
into civilian airspace is full of obstacles related to vehicle safety, security, standards in
technology, certification, regulations and policy, in addition to a wealth of technical issues that
need to be addressed and resolved.

This seminar provides an overview of such challenges and reviews several UAS applications and
their potential impact to society. Moreover, it highlights a methodology to integrate unmanned
aviation into the national airspace based on establishing Equivalent Levels of Safety (ELOS),
probability of failure of unmanned aircraft and kinetic energy upon impact.

Biography:

Dr. Kimon P. Valavanis joined the University of Denver in September 2008 as Professor and Chair of the
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He is currently John Evans Professor, Director of
Research and Innovation at the D. F. Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, and Founding
Director of the Unmanned Systems Research Institute. He is also Guest Professor in the Faculty of
Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He also was chosen by the
Academic Senate and the Board of Governors of the Politecnico di Torino to collaborate in research and
offer a series of seminars and short course in Robotics and Unmanned Systems under the Scuola di
Dottorato program requirements as part of the European Research Council (ERC), European Commission,
Horizon 2020 Scientific Programme, Part 1 – Excellent Science. Valavanis has offered similar courses at:
Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy; South China University of Technology; Technion
University, Israel; Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES), Vittoria, Brazil; Latin American and
Brazilian Robotics Competition, João Pessoa, Brazil; Poznan Institute of Technology, Poland; Technical
University of Crete and National Technical University of Athens, Greece. During his 30+ years of
Academic career, Valavanis has graduated 38 PhD students and more than 100 M.Sc. students. He has
attracted and has helped attracting close to $50M in research funds from Federal and State agencies,
industry and the private sector. While in Europe, he was funded by the Greek Secretariat of Research and
Technology, the European Union, industry, and from the Croatian Ministry of Science and Technology
(joint projects).
Valavanis' research interests focus on the areas of Unmanned Systems, Distributed Intelligence Systems,
Robotics and Automation. He has published more than 400 book chapters, technical journal, referred
conference papers, invited papers and technical reports. He has authored, co-authored and edited 19
books, two of which have been translated in Chinese. He has organized international conferences,
worldwide. He was Editor-in-chief (EIC) of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine for ten years;
EIC of the IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Newsletter for three years; EIC of the Journal of
Intelligent and Robotic Systems since 2006. He serves as co-chair/chair of the Aerial Robotics and
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Technical Committee since 2008. He serves since 1998 as Vice President of
the Mediterranean Control Association.
Dr. Valavanis has received invitations by the Hellenic Quality Assurance Agency (H.Q.A.A.) for Higher
Education of the Hellenic Republic to evaluate Greek Universities (ABET Evaluation), and by the European
Union to be an evaluator of IP and STREP projects as part of the 7th European Union (EU) Framework
Programme for Research and Technology Development (FP7) – Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT-2009.2.1 Cognitive Systems and Robotics), and he also served as a member of the Hearing
Committee panel in Luxemburg. He is an appointed Scientific Project Reviewer in projects financed by the
Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia and in research projects evaluated by
the Italian Evaluation of Research Quality exercise (VQR 2004-2010).
Dr. Valavanis was a Distinguished Speaker in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society; Senior
Member of IEEE; Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Fellow of the
U.K. Institute of Measurement and Control; Fulbright Scholar (Senior Lecturing & Research Award),
and, Technical Expert of the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO). In May of 2019,
during the 25-year anniversary meeting for the Robotics and Automation Magazine, he was awarded by
IEEE and the Robotics and Automation Society for his 10 years of service as Editor-in-Chief.

Address:Colorado, United States