Muscat, Oman | 9th February 2026 - 11th February 2026
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9 to 11 February 2026, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman
The 3rdInternational Conference on Unmanned Vehicle Systems (UVS-Oman 2026) is organized by the College of Engineering at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU). This three-day event aims to bring together leading academicians, researchers, engineers, industrials, and regulators to increase awareness, share views, and exchange ideas and field experiences on numerous aspects of Unmanned Vehicle Systems (UVS). This conference organized by SQU is expected to provide an opportunity to network researchers, practitioners, students, and hobbyists to enrich interdisciplinary UVS and related platforms and present the most recent innovations, trials, future trends, applications, concerns as well as challenges and solutions developed and applied in the various fields of applications. A number of workshops, students’ projects competition, and an exhibition on UVS will be scheduled during the event.
Keynote Title:Design, control, and applications of bioinspired dronesAbstract:Drones have taken the world by storm. In the past 15 years, small autonomous flyers have had a major impact in inspection, security, rescue, logistics, and entertainment. However, today's commercial drones cannot yet compete with flying animals in terms of mechanical resilience, adaptability, and cooperation. For example, multi-copters are very agile, but spend most of their energy to fight gravity; in contrast, winged drones offer almost twice as much endurance than multi-copters for the same mass but require more space and time to change direction. I will describe recent research addressing these challenges that takes inspiration from insects and birds, describe how such drones can be used to explain poorly understood biological mechanisms, and show examples of translation into commercial products. Finally, I will point out open challenges in design, modeling, and control of future drone systems.Biography:Dario Floreanois director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He has been the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics from 2010 to 2022. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He held visiting positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, at Harvard University, and Osaka University. He co-authored more than 500 publications and 5 books by MIT Press and Springer Verlag, spun off 3 drone companies, and is in the editorial board of several journals, including Science Robotics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).