PARTICIPATION

 

40th Anniversary of ICRA

The ICRA@40, the 40th Anniversary of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation took place from September 23 to 26 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Prof. Bonsignorio actively participated, discussed research and future projects with colleagues and presented two papers about bio-inspired space robotics:

The conference provided an excellent setting to draw attention to an ambitious new "startup lab": AIFORS. The papers propose a new distributed approach to manipulation, inspired by the behaviour of ants, for space applications and a new pointing approach for low-cost nanosatellites. Both articles are steps towards a new sustainable production system for the circular economy to be deployed in Earth orbit and beyond, along the lines of our EIC-PATHFINDER proposal ASTRO-FABER, which is currently under consideration. The articles were well received and paved the way for new joint research efforts in space robotics, where the new AI methods for robotics being developed by the AIFORS lab could be applied in the near future. In particular, a new collaboration with Prof. T. Ogata at Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan) is planned.


(Hyper)Complex Seminar 2024

(Hyper)Complex Seminar 2024 took place from September 14 to 18, 2024 in Lodz, Poland. It was organized in memory of Prof. Julian Ławrynowicz under the auspices of the Senate of the Republic of Poland.

Prof. Bonsignorio was invited to give a lecture and his talk entitled “Towards Physical AI” (online participation) was recorded and is available at the YouTube link. Lecture summary: Despite the remarkable progress that has been made in the fields of AI and robotics in recent years, artificial intelligent agents, also known as robots, are still far from the adaptability, dexterity and efficiency of their natural animal and even plant counterparts. How can we close this gap? Do we need a paradigm shift? We present some ideas on how we can build a new generation of robots that is much closer to the intelligent agents evolved in nature. The new model should also shed light on some important challenges in computational biology and medicine.


IEEE CASE 2024 Summer School on Autonomous Systems for Smart Cities 

The CASE 2024 Summer School on Autonomous Systems for Smart Cities was held on August 28, 2024 in Bari, Italy during the IEEE CASE 2024 conference, which is the most important conference on Automation organized by IEEE.

The Summer School showcased the latest advancements in autonomous systems research relevant to smart cities, providing insights to students, academic researchers, and industrial practitioners. The goal was to explore the integration of autonomous systems into various smart city scenarios, including traffic management, public safety, waste management, and energy efficiency. The summer school has been supported by the RAS TC Automation Cluster and the following RAS Technical Committees: Automation in Logistics, Agricultural Robotics and Automation, Digital Manufacturing and Human-Centered Automation, Performance Evaluation & Benchmarking of Robotic and Automation Systems.

Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio was one of the organizers and of the lecturers. 


European Robotics Forum 2024

Prof. Bonsignorio participated in the European Robotics Forum 2024 (ERF ’24) in Rimini, Italy which was held from March 13-15, 2024, where he organized and chaired the Workshop on Trustable and Dependable Intelligent Robots for Smart Societies followed by the Insight Session on the same topic. He presented three AIFORS Lab students’ posters and participated in the work of the euRobotics General Assembly.

Prof. Bonsignorio also served as a member of the jury of the Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award.


SCINERGY ’24 project event  

AIFORS team members Ivan Marković & Luka Petrović participated in the SCINERGY ’24 project event which took place on February 14 – 15, 2024 and it was an opportunity for meetings and discussions on potential collaborations between scientists and companies through a guided workshop. A whole day workshop was conducted with company Upgrade Ltd., that works on servicing and upgrading specialized vehicles, about possible modes of collaboration. 


2nd ML4NGP Training School

AIFORS' PhD students Vladimir and Athanasios participated in the COST Action: CA21160 - Non-globular proteins in the era of Machine Learning, 2nd ML4NGP Training School, which took place from 13-16 February 2024, at the University Pablo de Olavide, Carmona, Spain.

The school provided a dynamic and immersive learning experience of computational tools for proteins with theoretical lessons in the morning followed by hands-on practical sessions in the afternoon. It was led by 12 world-leading researchers providing comprehensive insight into recent advancements in computational resources, along with hands-on training for the study of non-globular proteins. 

The learning outcomes included tandem repeat proteins, intrinsically disordered proteins, aggregation and low complexity regions, computational tools to predict protein aggregation and phase separation, different databases and data mining tools, low complexity and compositional bias in protein sequences. Apart from the technical activities, the school provided participants with networking opportunities as well as gave participants a chance to connect informally after the scientific program.


CCVW 2023 workshop

As organized by UNIZG-FER, the workshop 11th Croatian Computer Vision Workshop (CCVW 2023) was held on November 15, 2023 in Zagreb with the participation of Ivan Bilić who presented in the oral session: „A Distance-Geometric Method for Recovering Robot Joint Angles From an RGB Image“ (Ivan Bilić, Filip Marić, Ivan Marković and Ivan Petrović), and Karlo Koledić who had a poster „Towards Camera Parameters Invariant Monocular Depth Estimation in Autonomous Driving“(Karlo Koledić, Ivan Marković and Ivan Petrović). The aim of the Workshop is to foster the exchange of ideas between researchers and to promote research and development collaboration between researchers and industry. Topics of interest include theory and applications of computer vision, image and video processing, analysis, and understanding. 


Dnevi avtomatike

Ivan Marković and Luka Petrović participated in “Dnevi avtomatike” event that was held on April 25, 2023. During their visit to the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, they discussed how AI can be used in the problems of robot navigation and bimanual manipulation of everyday objects.

The result of this visit is a joint project proposal HORACE - Human-robot collaborative manipulation by considering geometry and uncertainty, which has been accepted and will start soon.


ERAT 2023 conference

At the European Robotics and Automation Talks 2023, Ivan Marković had an invited talk titled "Highly accurate stereo visual odometry for the city and racetrack," that discussed localization of autonomous vehicles. The main idea is that such vehicles need to maintain highly accurate estimates of their pose for navigation purposes. But besides urban traffic, autonomous vehicles are also making their way to the racetrack, which presents novel challenges - although not plagued by dynamic objects, the scene is often low in texture, visually similar across the track, and captured with velocities above 200 km/h. In the talk Prof. Marković presented a stereo visual odometry solution, dubbed SOFT2, which has been for the past years the most accurate localization algorithm on the KITTI dataset, and its version adapted for rolling shutter cameras and the racetrack. Such problems are at the core of autonomous system localization which is currently dominated by deep networks, thus the apparent dichotomy between deep and "classical" approaches has also been explored within the AIFORS project.


euRobotics Topic Group coordinators and Board of Directors meeting

Prof. Bonsignorio participated at the euRobotics Topic Group coordinators and Board of Directors meeting as coordinator of the Topic Group for Standardization in the discussion and collection of ideas for the EU research strategy. The meeting took place on November 21, 2023, in Hannover, Germany and was organized by euRobotics aisbl to provide inputs to the EU Commission for the 2025-2027 Work Program in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics and the subsequent framework program.


IROS 2023 conference

The 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023) that took place on October 1- 5, 2023, in Detroit, USA featured plenaries by world-renowned roboticists, a robot exhibition hall, special sessions, and events, as well as hundreds of technical talks on the state-of-the-art in robotics.

Prof. Bonsignorio led and held the workshop on Methods for Objective Comparison of Results in Intelligent Robotics Research and also gave an invited lecture as part of the workshop It Works Really Well!: Verification in Theory and Practice.


ECMR 2023 conference

AIFORS' team attended the 11th European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR 2023), which took place from 4 to 7 September in Coimbra, Portugal where researcher Karlo Koledić presented the article:

while Ivan Petrović and Ivan Marković also participated in the conference. Ivan Marković was the program chair and Ivan Petrović was a board member of the conference.


IFAC World Congress 2023

The 22nd World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC 2023) took place from July 9-14, 2023 in Yokohama, Japan with participation of prof. Bonsignorio and prof. Petrović.

In addition to the technical sessions, the congress program also included a series of workshops and tutorials and prof. Bonsignorio participated in the workshops on Port-Hamiltonian Systems and Applications, Gaussian Process Learning for Systems and Control and Distributed Control, Optimization and Learning for Network Systems and the tutorial on Control Systems in Synthetic Biology. He also presented two papers that he co-authored with Dr. Enrika Zeriek:


ICRA 2023 conference

Within the 40th IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation conference (ICRA 2023) which took place from May 29 to June 2, 2023, in London prof. Bonsignorio attended the Workshop on Bio-inspired, Biomimetics and Biohybrid (Cyborg) Systems and participated in several IEEE meetings, such as the IEEE SA Working Group on Robot Agility, the IEEE SA Coordination Meeting, the IEEE RAS Technical Activities Board meeting and also the Automation Cluster meeting. He actively took part in the forum organized by the Automation Cluster and further discussed possible collaborations with potential international research partners.


4th G2Net Training School

AIFORS' PhD students Vladimir and Athanasios together with prof. Bonsignorio attended the COST Action CA17137 - 4th G2net Training school on Gravitational Waves, Geophysics and Machine Learning in Thessaloniki Greece, from March 28-31, 2023. The school was focused on neural networks for sensing low-frequency signals, accelerating surrogate models with machine learning, and denoising using machine learning. 

Vladimir actively participated in the school and took the bronze place at the hackathon where the goal was to determine the range of signal-to-noise ratios of different signals. Apart from that, there was an outreach activity of short storytelling, understanding the target audience and preparing a script for a monologue/video and Vladimir was selected as one of the best.

There were 15 lecturers from different countries and universities and participants learned about data collection methods and discovering open data, different data representations including the spectrogram and Q-transform, obtaining the waveform with given parameters, finding a peak in noisy signal and estimating its significance, parameter estimation neural networks for different cases such as Gaussian distribution with diagonal (learnable) covariance and Normalizing flow (RealNVP).


European Robotics Forum 2023

Europe's largest robotics conference, European Robotics Forum (ERF 2023) took place from March 14-16, 2023 in Odense, Denmark with the participation of prof. Fabio Bonsignorio and prof. Ivan Petrović.

Prof. Bonsignorio co-chaired the workshop on trustworthy and reliable intelligent robots for smart societies, organized and participated in several meetings with potential European research partners as well as took part in the work of the euRobotics General Assembly. He also participated as a member of the jury of the Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award, award given to showcase PhD theses defended during the previous year in European Universities from all areas of robotics.


ERAT 2022 conference

At the European Robotics and Automation Talks 2022, Ivan Marković gave a talk titled "Safe human-robot cohabitation for highly flexible warehouses" and presented a system that avoids complete separation of robots and humans in highly flexible warehouses. A novel safety concept was developed based on the Safety Vest, worn by human workers, that can shut down specific AGVs and ensure functional safety (on track for SIL 2 / PL d). It can also provide location of the human worker, thereby enabling the fleet management system to reroute the robots in order to minimize human-robot encounters. The developed system is not only applicable to robotized warehouses, but to any application where humans and machines share the workspace and where human proximity can result in an unsafe situation. An interesting direction when it comes to safety is intrinsic safety by design, which is native to soft robots and methods, as described earlier, can be mitigated. Controlling such intrinsically safe soft robots is very challenging and is one of the research topic conducted within the AIFORS scope.


Central European Technology Forum (CETEF'22)

Prof. Petrović participated in CETEF'22, which took place on 25 October 2022 in Wroclaw, as an invited keynote speaker with the lecture Mobile Robotics and AI in Robotisation of the European Industry. The lecture was given as part of the thematic conference on development trends, opportunities and obstacles in the robotization of European industry, and the main topic of the session dedicated to the automation and robotization of production processes was the methods of overcoming the challenges facing the industry.


G2Net workshop on Machine Learning in GW search: g2net next challenges

The workshop was organized by the COST Action G2Net (CA17137) and took place on September 28-30, 2022 at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Casina, Pisa, Italy. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the state-of-the-art, as well as future challenges of machine learning applied to gravitational wave research.

Prof. Bonsignorio gave a talk entitled Pros and Cons of Mobile Sensors on September 28, 2022 and also held a series of informal meetings with the workshop participants in which he introduced them to the AIFORS project and expressed interest in a possible collaboration.


7th International Workshop on Advanced Cooperative Systems

 On September 21, 2022, prof. Fabio Bonsignorio gave an invited talk entitled Towards Intelligent Soft Robotics – A New Paradigm Physical AI unifying Robust and Adaptive Soft Robotics and AI at the 7th International Workshop on Advanced Cooperative Systems, organized by the National Center of Research Excellence for Data Science and Cooperative Systems and coordinated by prof. Ivan Petrović, the AIFORS coordinator.

This was a good opportunity to present the research strategy of the ERA Chair to the local community, as the workshop was attended by more than 70 professors, postdocs and PhD students from UNIZG-FER. This led to a series of follow-up meetings between prof. Bonsignorio and colleagues from UNIZG-FER, where the possibility of mutual collaboration was discussed.


IEEE Ro-Man 2022 conference

Prof. Bonsignorio (co)organized the tutorial Blockchain technologies for robotic systems at IEEE Ro-man 2022 conference, Naples, September 2, 2022.

The program and more details can be found at the link.


European Robotics Forum 2022

Prof. Bonsignorio (co)organized the workshop Progress in reproducibility of robotics research and benchmarking at the European Robotics Forum, Rotterdam, Netherlands, June 29, 2022.


Eurobench Summit 2022

Prof. Bonsignorio delivered the presentations HumaBelief. Belief Space Planning for Robust Humanoid Locomotion and HumaBiMan. BiManual Manipulation by DL and Fractional Control on TEO Humanoid Robot at the Eurobench Summit - An essential meeting for robotics benchmarking in Europe, Madrid, Spain, on June 22, 2022.

For both presentations check the YouTube link at 30’ mark.


ICRA 2022 conference

Prof. Bonsignorio (co)organized the tutorial How to write an R-article and benchmark your results and presented it at ICRA 2022 conference, Philadelphia, PA, USA on May 27, 2022.


SOCIAL MEDIA

 


PROJECTS

 

 

 


Funding

 

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement No. 952275