Daily newspaper Vecernji list visited Specularia project team to discuss the impact of the implementation of 5G on both the global and domestic economies, in which exceptional speed of information, communication and services are becoming possible. Project Coordinator Matko Orsag and Specularia researchers explained how 5G technology will enable innovation and the implementation of ideas into reality, and their robots will finally be able to talk to each other and make decisions all the time. Full article (in Croatian) available  here .

Three more members have recently joined the LARICS team -  Marijana Peti, Jelena Tabak, and Filip Zorić! Marijana Peti graduated with a master's degree from   the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing  in 2020. During her studies, she received  three   “Josip Lončar” Awards  and the City of Zagreb scholarships  due to her academic success. Her research interests include multi-agent systems and unmanned aerial vehicles. Jelena Tabak graduated with a master's degree from the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing  in 2020. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. and working as a  Research and Teaching Assistant . Her research interests include soft robotics manipulation and machine learning.  Fillip Zorić graduated from the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER) in 2018 by having successfully defended his master thesis Control of Multirotor-UAV by Using Variable Rotational Plane Rotors . After that, he worked in robotics start-up company Gideon Brothers for 2 years. As of October 2020, he a Research Assistant at LARICS in the scope of the Aerial-Core project where he is also pursuing his PhD degree. His research interests are in the intertwining of control, perception, and robotic manipulation.

The Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems (LARICS) has become a partner in new H2020 FET project WatchPlant - SMART BIOHYBRID PHYTO-ORGANISMS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL IN SITU MONITORING . WatchPlant will develop a new biohybrid system technology, a wireless wearable self-powered sensor for in-situ monitoring of urban environments. This system equips urban biological organisms -plants- with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a smart sensor for measuring both, environmental parameters and the responding physiological state of plants, in a very early stage by the use of a barely explored fluid, phloem sap, in combination with chemical, and physical sensors. It will be integrated into complex network that allows performing distributed information processing, decision making, modeling and data fitting, paving the way for the self-awareness or self-adaptation. Additionally, it will constitute a clean energy self-powered device due to the novel use of sap, not only for transforming plants into living sensors, but also for clean energy generation.

As one of three partners that participate in new ERASMUS+ project, LARICS researchers will be responsible for the 3rd semester curriculum of Joint Master program entitled Intelligent Field Robotic Systems (IFRoS). Also, LARICS staff will mentor master students in 4th semester during master diploma thesis preparation. The Intelligent Field Robotic Systems (IFRoS) Master Programme aims to train a new generation of engineers who will develop new applications and tools to expand the capabilities of field robots in the near future. The technology behind the development of these systems comes from different research areas such as artificial intelligence, computer vision, control, sensorization, automatic learning, and others, all of them under fast-paced evolution in the current digital revolution. IFRoS is a 2-year joint master degree with 120 ECTS coordinated by the Universitat de Girona (UdG, Spain) together with the University of Zagreb (UNIZG, Croatia) and the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Hungary) as consortium programme partners.

To commemorate Europe Code Week , an online exchange of knowledge and experience was designed and moderated by Sanja Pavlović Šijanović, Sanda Šutalo and Kristinka Lemaić with the involvement of students from three Croatian high schools. At the invitation of Kristinka Lemaić, Petar Ljubotina , fourth-year student at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, presented the Industrial School of Mechanical Engineering with a short video. Petar was awarded the Rector's Award in the academic year 2019/2020 in the field of technical sciences for his scientific team work "Humanoid robot Pepper as a welcome manager at FER" . Special thanks goes to Prof. Zdenko Kovačić  for giving the opportunity to high school students to gain insight into the work of FER students. Given the current epidemiological situation, most of the events during the EU Code Week have been moved to the virtual world. The social initiative CodeWeek was launched by the European Commission with the aim of promoting programming and digital literacy. This event gathers more and more participants every year, so in 2019 the number of participants reached 4.2 million people from more than 80 countries. Read more (in Croatian):  Robotika i programiranje nisu bauk

LARICS team attended  Breaking the Surface 2020  workshop from September 27 to October 4, 2020. This was the 12th edition of this international intersiciplinary field workshop of marine robotics and its applications, held every year in Biograd na moru, Croatia.  LARICS members actively participated in the workshop programme with their PhD presentations and tutorials, and attended lectures by  AeRoTwin partners  from  the University of Seville  (J. Ramiro Martinez de Dios, Augusto Gómez Eguíluz, Julio L. Paneque) and  Imperial College London  (Mirko Kovac, Crystal Winston, Andre Farinha, Julien di Tria), and the  invited talk by Ivana Palunko  (University of Dubrovnik) organized within H2020 AeRoTwin project. Check the photos here .