Our PhD students Antun Ivanovic, Lovro Markovic, Marko Krizmancic and Ana Batinovic attended the 2020 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems hosted at Czech Technical University in Prague from 14th to 18th of September 2020 . The Summer School program aims at promoting the newest achievements in multi-robot system research.  The main scope of the program was swarm robotics, including lectures by well-recognized experts in the field, group seminars, computer practicals, and outdoor experiments.  Moreover, the Summer School was a great opportunity for networking with other participants and lecturers.  You can find more about the Summer School at http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/summer-school/ Check out photos in the Gallery.

Our PhD student Antonella Barišić attended the Programming short course and workshop on Deep Learning and Computer Vision for Autonomous Systems from 19th to 21st of August, 2020. The workshop was held remotely with more than 40 participants. The aim of the workshop was to provide theoretical and practical programming knowledge on applying computer vision techniques and deep learning to solve problems in robotics such as object detection and target tracking.

International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems ICUAS 2020, as a hybrid conference, both virtual and physical event, was held from 1st to 4th of September 2020 in Athens, Greece. LARICS' PhD student Antun Ivanovic virtually presented a scientific paper: A. Ivanovic, M. Car, M. Orsag, and S. Bogdan, “Exploiting null space in aerial manipulation through model-in-the-loop motion planning”   The video of demonstration experiments can be found here .

LARICS has got another team member – Dean Martinovic!  After graduating from the  University of Stuttgart Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering , Dean worked in the automotive industry as embedded software developer on AUTOSAR software components. After returning to the University of Stuttgart in 2012, he completed his  Ph.D. in the area of magnetic field based localization systems for inductive charging purposes of electric vehicles . Wishing Dean good luck and a lot of successful endeavors in the LARICS team!

This year, International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA 2020 is being held form 31 May to 31 August as a virtual conference with some live events.  LARICS' PhD students  Bruno Maric  and  Marko Krizmancic have sent in video presentations of the following scientific papers: Maric B., Mutka A., Orsag M., (2020),   Collaborative Human-Robot Framework for Delicate Sanding of Complex Shape Surfaces Krizmancic M., Arbanas B., Petrovic T., Petric F., Bogdan S., (2020), Cooperative Aerial-Ground Multi-Robot System for Automated Construction Tasks The video presentations and the papers are now available to all registered participants of ICRA 2020 .

LARICS team was busy before the pandemic shut everything down for a few months.  Following his talk at E-Conference Better Future of Healthy Ageing 2020 (BFHA 2020) , Professor Kovacic gave an interview for ZIMO portal on the preliminary work with Pepper robots being demonstrators of rehabilitation exercises and plans for the future of humanoid robots in healthcare. Full article (in Croatian) is available here .

In celebration of the World Bee Day (May 20), Prof. Stjepan Bogdan held an invited talk “Swarm Intelligence in Animal-Robot Interaction” at the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla  in Zagreb. Prof. Bogdan presented very interesting results of research done on bee communication channels and social behaviour of bees. The talk was a part of a special programme the Museum had prepared to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face and their contribution to sustainable development.