Austrian robotics workshop

About 80 researchers from industry and academia met at the Austrian Robotics Workshop in Klagenfurt on May 7 and 8, 2015, giving talks and demonstrations on recent developments in robotics and autonomous systems. Among them, various Lakeside Labs scientists presented their research in unmanned aerial vehicle systems, namely on wireless communications, collision avoidance, path planning, and video streaming.

Two highlights were keynote talks given by invited experts: Sabine Hauert from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and University of Bristol talked about nano robots in medical applications. “The challenge is to discover how trillions of nanobots can work together to improve the detection and treatment of tumors. Towards this end, the field of swarm robotics offers tools and techniques for controlling large numbers of robots with limited capabilities. Our swarm strategies are designed in realistic simulators using bio-inspiration, machine learning and crowdsourcing,” she states. Christian Philipp held an interview with her.

The second keynote was given by Werner Huber from BMW about self-driving cars (slides). He demonstrated the state-of-the-art and gave an outlook to the future. “For a future series production, automated cars need to perform as safe as a driver. That requires new automotive redundancy architectures with fail operational concepts. Further, vehicle automation requires a holistic approach with regard to design of car interior and driver monitoring. A connection to the backend ensures the provision of the latest high-precision digital maps as well as dynamic traffic and route information,” Huber said.