Professor Stjepan Bogdan went to Abu Dhabi to take part in the 2019 International Symposium on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence on March 10 and 11, where he held a lecture in the Aerial and Underwater Systems session. The lecture was titled "Aerial Robotics – manipulation and interaction with the environment" , dealing with the topic of present results in aerial robotics done in our Lab, particularly when it comes to the problem of controlling the force of interaction between an aerial vehicle equipped with a dexterous manipulator and the environment. You can find more info on the event, as well as a book of abstracts, by following this link .

Our Asst. Prof. Matko Orsag went to Čakovec, Croatia, on 28 February 2019 to take part in an conference on agriculture titled " Managing knowledge in agriculture " ("Upravljanje znanjem u poljoprivredi" in Croatian), where he attended lectures, met experts in this area, and presented the Laboratory's project Specularia . As the Coordinator of the project, Matko talked about the use of robotics in agriculture and its potential future impact and uses in this field of economy and everyday life.

LARICS team members took part in the European Robotics League Emergency Local Tournament on 18-23 February in Seville, Spain, where they achieved amazing results - they won first place overall, as well as best ground team ! During the five days of the competition, they worked hard on developing their ground and aerial robots, making them work together autonomously in various environments, and they even found the time to take part in the 1st AeRoTwin Training with partners from the University of Seville. This hard work paid off and was rewarded with the great results they achieved. We would like to congratulate our colleagues for their efforts and achievments, and wish them even more success in the future! You can find a gallery from the tournament here .

This month we will be going to Seville , Spain, to take part in the European Robotics League Emergency Local Tournament 2019 ! Our team has been pre-selected for this competitive and interesting event , so we will have to combine our knowledge of ground and aerial robots to make them work together. They will have to be as autonomous as possible, capable of coordinating through both indoor and outdoor environments and will have to perform specific advanced tasks. We are working very hard for this competition and are looking forward to taking part in it!

On February 18 and 19 , 2019, our team will be going to Seville to take part in the first AeRoTwin hands-on training with the title  Drone Localization and Mapping . The training will be held at the Robotics, Vision and Control Group (GRVC ) Lab premises in Seville, Spain, and our lecturers are experienced members of this lab and the AeRoTwin project team, who will help us learn more about drone localization and mapping, the newest developed techniques and technology, the theoretical background and practical applications. You can find out more about the content of the training, the lecturers and related institution by following this link .

Our team's representatives, Matko and Stjepan, went to Spain to the beautiful city of Cáceres , where they will take part in the Kick-off meeting for one of our newest projects, ENCORE - ENergy aware BIM Cloud Platform in a COst-effective Building REnovation Context. There, they are meeting with the project partners and coordinators, and are discussing the plans for the project, their goals, ideas for the future, etc. Their main goal in the following years is to increase the share of renovated stock in Europe and worldwide by providing effective and affordable BIM tools that cover the whole renovation life-cycle. We wish them all a great start and successful project!

We have some great news for the final month of ADORE project! The paper entitled “ Hierarchical POMDP Framework for a Robot-assisted ASD Diagnostic Protocol ” has been accepted for oral presentation at the prestigious international conference ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction HRI 2019 . The conference will be held on March 11-14, 2019 in Daegu, South Korea, and our dr. sc. Frano Petric will do the presentation.

On 16 January 2019 , our professor Stjepan Bogdan took part in a TV show titled Treći Element (Third Element) on the Croatian National Television, where he discussed the ASSISIbf project with the guests and hosts, talked about what biomimetics is and how it can be applied, as well as how nature and robotics can work together. We would like to thank Treći Element for the invitation - you can watch the whole episode of the show by following this link (in Croatian).