Panagiotis THEODORAKOPOULOS On autonomous target tracking for UAVs

Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y.) for offering me the chance to prepare this Ph.D. in France, by financing this project. Secondly, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Simon Lacroix, whose great sense of humor, expertise, patience, warm leadership skills, and well-targeted ideas helped me get through this long term project. Simon, thank you a lot, I've learned a lot from you and if I started this Ph.D. all over again, I would still do it with you. Thirdly, I would like to express my gratitude to Raja Chatila and Rachid Alami for accepting me in the robotics group, to Jean-Louis Calvet for participating at the defense jury, to Anibal Ollero and Claude Pegard for reviewing the thesis manuscript and finally to Pascal Brisset for participating in the jury as well as to the whole ENAC team for producing such a useful tool as the Paparazzi autopilot/simulator. Fourthly, I would also like to thank Bertrand Vandeportaele for his valuable support during the flights, his technical advices and mostly for letting me know what it means to be a real engineer-I hope that you will invite me to see that house of yours when it is completed. A big 'thank you' to Dimitris Fragkoulis for his support, good times spent around our common washing machine and the laughs we had when we had to drive each other to the airport-I just learned that we could have used one of the airport parking spots instead. I also would like to thank Gautier Hattenberger for his help not only in the early phases of this thesis but also for his support as a member of the Paparazzi autopilot team, as well as Michel Courdesses for offering some good advises during the early phases of this thesis. I would like to say a glorious thank you to all the people (and plants) that I've spent some time with in room B67. Viviane Cadenat for her jokes and good times, Tereza Vidal for her big smile coming from the other side of the desk, Joan Sola for his engaging ideas, talks and proofreading help, Louis F.Marin for the funny times and proofreading corrections, Norman Juchler for throwing balls of paper at me, eating all my yogurts and organizing cool parties. Finally, I should include in this list, the strange cactus named 'Finis-ta-these' …