Mohamed Bin Zayed International

Robotics Challenge 2017

We competed and won in the prestigious Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) held during 16-18 March 2017 at the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The team led by Dr. Martin Saska of the Multi-robot Systems (MRS) group at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, accompanied by a representative of the American University of Pennsylvania and the British University of Lincoln, won first place in the discipline of cooperative collection of objects using a group of autonomous helicopters (Challenge 3) and took silver position in the category of autonomous landing on a moving vehicle (Challenge 1). This success earned the team the possibility to participate in the Grand Challenge competition, in which they have won the bronze medal together with colleagues from the Italian University of Padua.

The Multi-robot Systems (MRS) group has participated in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge . The Robotics Challenge is organized by Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi and took place in February 2017. Team of Czech Technical University in Prague , University of Pennsylvania and University of Lincoln , where members of MRS group play key roles and which is led by Martin Saska , has been selected for gaining sponsorship from the Khalifa University out of 143 applicants from the most prestigious universities in the world.

During the competition, MRS members strongly cooperate with researches from Departments of Cybernetics and Computer Science and Engineering associated in Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems , and mainly with researchers from University of Pennsylvania and University of Lincoln. In particular, the computer vision techniques needed for the Challenges 1 and 3 will be investigated by researchers from Center for Machine Perception of Department of Cybernetics and from University of Lincoln. The MAV stabilization, control, and the active manipulation with objects in Challenge 3 was handled within a tight cooperation of members of our group and researchers from the team of Vijay Kumar from GRASP laboratory at University of Pennsylvania. The planning and coordination of the MAV team was tackled by researches of MRS group together with Agent Technology Center of dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at CTU.

Team:

	Martin Saska (Team Leader), Tomáš Báča, Vojtěch Spurný, Robert Pěnička, Vojtěch Vonásek, Petr Štěpán, Tomáš Svoboda, Karel Zimmerman, Jan Faigl
	Vijay Kumar, Giuseppe Loianno, Justin Thomas, Dinesh Thakur
	Tomáš Krajník