The AIFORS team, professors Fabio Bonsignorio, Ivan Petrović and Ivan Marković, together with Juraj Peršić from Calirad d.o.o., went to Osijek on June 10, 2024 to visit companies Protostar Labs and Orqa. Together with companies' representatives, they discussed possible cooperation and joint project proposals for relevant incoming calls. Protostar Labs d.o.o.    is a Croatian software development company founded in 2019 and focused on developing advanced solutions based on artificial intelligence and computer vision. They specialize in the development of industrial production automation solutions that use artificial intelligence to automatically recognize and classify products and detect errors and malfunctions.

Croatian company Orqa d.o.o. was founded in 2018 with the mission to innovate products across the FPV drones’ industry. They are focused on innovating and developing all parts    of the FPV technology stack as they strive to become the World’s number one technology provider for First Person View (FPV) and advanced Remote Reality (RR) applications by developing enabling technology for next-generation vision systems.

As a result of the visit to Orqa, we have established a collaboration with them through a  tool called Test-Before-Invest (TBI), implemented by the local EDIH Crobohub++. This tool is designed to help bring companies and research institutions together on R&D problems that the companies want to investigate but for which they currently have neither the capacity nor the experience to carry out this analysis themselves. In particular, the AIFORS and LAMOR teams are working on defining a navigation and control architecture for the unmanned aerial vehicles that Orqa wants to produce.

About AIFORS Workshops on Industry– Academia Collaboration 

Industry-academia collaboration workshops are half-day events that would consist of panel discussions around topics of innovation related to intelligent robotics. The aim is for participants from industry to meet with academic counterparts to share their challenges and opportunities and to establish collaboration agreements with industrial partners.

The 1st AIFORS Workshop on Industry – Academia Collaboration took place on July 9, 2024 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER). To reach a broader industry community, the workshop was organized in collaboration with the local European Digital Innovation Hub: Crobohub++ - CROatian Industry and Society Boosting, and the coordinator of EDIH: ARTES 5.0 in Pisa, Italy, Prof. Paolo Dario was invited as a keynote speaker to the workshop.

The workshop program included the speeches of Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio and Prof. Ivan Petrović and of invited speakers with rich international experience in research and development in robotics and artificial intelligence who presented their past collaborations with industry and the latest research and views on the future.

The workshop was attended by 70 participants, 25 of whom came from 18 companies.

The workshop agenda with the brief info about speakers and their talks can be found here.

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.