My student Estela Mora Barba disserted her Telematics BSc thesis

🎓 Outstanding Bachelor’s Thesis Defense

On Wednesday, May 14, 2025, my student Estela Mora Barba successfully defended her Bachelor’s Thesis titled “Smart Management System for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles in Precision Agriculture on Edge”. Her work received the highest possible grade—Outstanding (10/10)—from the evaluation committee, along with a nomination for Honors Distinction (Matrícula de Honor).

The project addresses major challenges in modern agriculture, including rising operational costs, labor shortages, and climate-related pressures. Estela designed and implemented an intelligent system for managing fleets of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in precision farming, applying edge computing to increase autonomy, efficiency, and sustainability.

Built on models developed in the AFarCloud project by the GRyS Research Group at ETSIST-UPM, she extended the architecture significantly. Her contributions included task dependency management and new domain-specific operations such as TREATMENT, ANALYZE_IMAGE, and SPRAY.

The system features a microservice architecture using ROS 2 (Jazzy Jalisco) for communication, gRPC for internal messaging, REST APIs for external services, MariaDB for data persistence, and ThingsBoard for real-time telemetry visualization.

The development followed a rigorous process with UML modeling, Python implementation, and documentation using Sphinx. Validation was carried out in compliance with ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119:2020, confirming robustness under complex simulated agricultural missions.

Estela’s work is a standout example of applying modern technologies to real-world needs. It delivers tangible advances in autonomous and sustainable agriculture, aligned with several UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This outstanding result reflects her exceptional skills, commitment, and technical maturity, and marks a promising step toward future innovation in agri-tech.