The University of Zagreb (1669) is the oldest and biggest university in South-Eastern Europe. Ever since its foundation, the University has been continually growing and developing and now consists of 29 faculties, three art academies, and the Centre for Croatian Studies. With its comprehensive programs and over 60,000 full-time undergraduate and postgraduate students, the University is the strongest teaching institution in Croatia.  It offers a wide range of academic degree courses leading to Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral degrees in the following fields: Arts, Biomedicine, Biotechnology, Engineering, Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences. It is also a strongly research-oriented institution, contributing over 50 percent to the total research output of the country.

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER) is the largest technical faculty and leading educational and R&D institution in the fields of electrical engineering, information and communication technology and computing in the Republic of Croatia. Being a constituent of the University of Zagreb, UNIZG-FER has its roots in the Technical Faculty, founded in 1919. In 1956, the departments of Technical Faculty grew into four new faculties, the Faculty of Electrical Engineering being one of them. The Faculty offers today substantial educational and R&D facilities including 35 lecture halls, more than 60 laboratories, a Congress center, a teleconference center, a central library and 12 department libraries, a student restaurant, and sport and recreation facilities on 43,308 m2.

The Faculty is organized in 12 departments that represent the focal points of education, research and development in various fields. The present research and educational staff comprise about 200 professors and 300 teaching and research assistants and around 3,800 students at the undergraduate and graduate level and 500 PhD students. All those numbers clearly emphasize highly-spirited activities in teaching and research. 

The Faculty has developed valuable international cooperation with many research institutions around the world, either directly or through inter-university cooperation. The number of international projects makes UNIZG-FER constantly one of the top two most internationally active institutions in Croatia. 

Through AIFORS, the ERA Chair holder will contribute to the implementation of the UNIZG-FER’s Development Strategy.

Laboratory for Autonomous Systems and Mobile Robotics (LAMOR, http://lamor.fer.hr/) at UNIZG-FER focuses its research activities in the field of autonomous systems and mobile robotics, with special emphasis on the following three key research domains: (i) robot perception and sensor fusion - the aim is to provide robots with the capabilities to sense environments and identify surrounding assets, (ii) robot localization and environment mapping - the aim is to provide robots with capabilities to localize itself in the environment, and to build the environment map needed for robot operation, and (iii) robot motion planning and control - the aim is to provide robots with capabilities to plan effective, yet safe motion in an environment based on the information received from the robot perception, localization and mapping modules. These research domains are addressed by the following three robotic functions: autonomy, interaction and safety. 

Currently, LAMOR has 21 members: 1 full professor, 2 associate professors, 2 postdocs, 14 PhD students, and 2 project managers. The lab is equipped with state-of-the-art ground mobile platforms, robot arms, aerial vehicles, sets of advanced perception sensors, flying arena, etc. LAMOR researchers regularly publish their results in high impact robotic and control journals and in proceedings of flagship conferences. LAMOR has also a long tradition of collaboration with research centers and industry in Croatia, the EU, and worldwide, mainly through joint research projects. 

LAMOR long-term future applications include manufacturing, robots at homes and public spaces, which are highly dynamic and complex, and collaboration with humans and safety play a primary concern. Given that, LAMOR still needs expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) to enable robot learning, reasoning, optimization and planning for addressing highly dynamic, complex environments to achieve a further quantum leap in research excellence. Our aim is that the ERA Chair holder with his/her team, which will be recruited by the AIFORS project, brings this expertise to LAMOR. The synergy of the ERA Chair team and the existing expertise will enable LAMOR to become an internationally recognized research excellent lab – the leader in AI-empowered robots and related technologies, and a highly desired research partner in national and international projects.