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.

On 21 May 2020 , LARICS team carried out dynamic median consensus experiments. Five aMussels were used to communicate underwater depth measurements trying to reach a common measurement value. The experiment was performed at Lake Jarun in Zagreb , and the results will be used to support a journal paper that is being prepared.

LARICS team is growing -   Jurica Goricanec has joined the lab! After graduating from the UNIZG-FER, Jurica worked in the industry developing and designing UAVs for different purposes, such as collecting geophysical information and carrying out inspections. He is currently also doing his Ph.D. at the UNIZG-FER under the mentorship of Prof. Stjepan Bogdan. We wish him a lot of successful projects and a stimulating work environment. Welcome, Jurica!

The Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems (LARICS) has become a partner in two new projects – the EU H2020 AeroWind project and the  Danieli Group project , for which grants agreements have been recently signed. Both projects have been kicked off in May 2020 , and all the project activities will be implemented over a period of 1 year (Danieli), and 1.5 years (AeroWind), respectively. LARICS has partnered up with Danieli Group to develop a pilot system that aims to show autonomous inspection of the process of steel elements production by using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The second project ‘Autonomous UAV inspection of wind turbine blades – AeroWind’ is a new EU project funded under the HORIZON 2020 programme. This project, built on previous research done by LARICS through FP7 project EuRoC, will focus on the implementation of novel methods for UAVs navigation and control, based on state-of-the-art technologies, increase in the speed and efficiency of wind turbine inspection, and a significant decrease in the cost of inspection and downtime of wind turbines.

A new chapter on 'Multi-rotor Systems, Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control of ' written by Stjepan Bogdan, Matko Orsag, and Paul Oh has been published in the Encyclopedia of Robotics . The subject matter covered in the chapter – kinematic and dynamic model of the multi-rotor system – is the first step towards any real application of aerial vehicles. This includes various surveillance missions that require an eye in the sky, like search and rescue missions, infrastructure inspection, archaeology, film industry, and many more. The Springer Reference Work Encyclopedia of Robotics addresses the existing need for an easily accessible yet authoritative and granular knowledge resource in robotic science and engineering. The encyclopedia is a work that comprehensively explains the scientific, application-based, interactive, and socio-ethical parameters of robotics. It is the first work that explains at the concept and fact level the state of the field of robotics and its future directions. You can read the chapter  here .