After a year off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems is back! Summer School 2022 will follow the great success of Summer Schools in Singapore, 2016 and in Prague, 2019 and 2020. As in 2019 and 2020, the IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems, 2022 will be held at the campus of Czech Technical University, located at the heart of the beautiful and historic city of Prague. The Summer School will promote the newest achievements in Multi-Robot Systems research to students, academic researchers, and industrial practitioners to enable putting systems of cooperating robots into practice. The main scope of the 2022 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems will be systems of cooperating aerial vehicles and swarms, including lectures by well-recognized experts in the field, and hands-on experience with real-world experiments using state-of-the-art aerial platforms developed for Multi-Robot research. The 2022 IEEE RAS Summer School will be focused on deployment of MRS in real-world conditions being motivated by EU Aerial-Core project and DARPA SubTChallenge. The 2022 Summer School is primarily considered for on-site participants since there was a minimal number of COVID cases and no travel restrictions were applied in the Czech Republic in July-August in 2020 and 2021. Nevertheless, we will allow also virtual participation for students from countries with travel restrictions or limitations.
The goal of Summer School 2022 is to provide students and young researchers with the knowledge, ideas, and experience of the best experts in the field of Multi-Robot Systems in a comprehensive and effective way. We want to provide you with the theoretical and practical overview required to bring your MRS research from scientific achievements to practical deployment and verification.
Based on your preference, you will be grouped with other students of the same research interests to encourage networking possibilities and to gain deeper knowledge in the selected domain of MRS. During the group seminars, tasks relevant to an individual scope of students will be discussed and tackled.
Following the lectures, you will get the opportunity to implement learned methodology into a fully functional robotic system. You will see your results first-hand during the real experiments conducted at the end of the school under the supervision of experienced researchers in the field of swarm robotics.
One of the most attractive parts of the Summer School is the practical exercise conducted by all participants on the last day of the session. This unique opportunity of working hands-on with real aerial multi-robot systems utilizes knowledge gained at the school and may be crucial in your future research. The best performing students will be awarded with a small souvenir.
On each day of the Summer School, an evening social program is organized to give you the chance to both relax after a tough day of lectures and exercises, and to network among other participants and lecturers. A variety of events take place, including a tour of historic Prague, welcome and farewell parties, a Czech pubs tour, and a banquet with a social program.
You can find the 2020 Summer School highlights here! You can also visit the past website.
The main scope of the 2020 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems focused on swarm robotics, including lectures by well-recognized experts in the field, and hands-on experience with real-world experiments using state-of-the-art aerial platforms developed for Multi-Robot research.
Check out this short video and be sure to visit the Summer School 2019 website.
The content for this year was focused on cooperating aerial vehicles. The topics addressed by the attending expert lecturers were structured to give the participants the necessary knowledge for understanding existing theory and for realisation of real-world experiments with a fleet of autonomous micro aerial vehicles.
Norwegian university of science and technology
Kostas Alexis obtained his Ph.D. in the field of aerial robotics control and collaboration from the University of Patras, Greece in 2011. His Ph.D. research was supported by the Greek National-European Commission Excellence scholarship. After successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis, he was awarded a Swiss Government fellowship and moved to Switzerland and ETH Zurich. From 2012 to June 2015 he held the position of Senior Researcher at the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH Zurich, leading the lab efforts in the fields of control and path planning for advanced navigational and operational autonomy. During summer 2015 he moved to the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Nevada, Reno where he got tenured in 2020. Since Fall 2020 he moved to the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology as a Full Professor. He is the founder and director of the Autonomous Robots Lab involving more than 15 researchers and conducting research in the domain of autonomy, perception, planning and control. Dr. Alexis' research has received multiple awards, includes the world record in unmanned aircraft endurance, and has been funded by a variety of sources including DARPA, NSF, DOE, USDA, NASA, the European Commission, the Norwegian Research Council the private sector and other sources. Notable achievements include the winning performance of Team CERBERUS (with Prof. Alexis being the PI) at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Finals (September 2021), and the world-endurance record in the below 50kg UAV-class with the 81.5h of the solar-powered AtlantikSolar co-developed by Dr. Alexis and colleagues at ETH Zurich.
Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS)
Dr. Rachid Alami is Senior Scientist at LAAS-CNRS. He received an engineer diploma in computer science in 1978 from ENSEEIHT, a Ph.D in Robotics in 1983 from Institut National Polytechnique and an Habilitation HDR in 1996 from Paul Sabatier University. He contributed and took responsibilities in several national, European and international research and/or collaborative projects (ESPRIT: MARTHA, PROMotion, IST FP6 projects: COGNIRON, URUS, PHRIENDS, and FP7 projects: CHRIS, SAPHARI, ARCAS, SPENCER, H2020: MuMMER, France: VAP-RISP for planetary rovers, several ANR projects). He is holding since 2019 the Academic Chair on Cognitive and Interactive Robotics at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute (ANITI) His main research contributions fall in the fields of Robot Decisional and Control Architectures, Task and motion planning, multi-robot cooperation, and human-robot interaction.
University of Seville
Aníbal Ollero received his Electrical Engineering degree and the Doctor Engineer degree with award from the University of Seville. He worked in an engineering office and was assistant professor at the University of Seville (1976-1980). Later he was full professor at the Spanish Universities of Santiago de Compostela in Vigo, Málaga and Sevilla. In Vigo he was Associate Professor and Full Professor. He also was Director of the Department of "Electrical, Computers and System Engineering" and Secretary and Research Vice-Director of the Engineering School. In Málaga he was Full Professor, Director of the Engineering School and Head of the Departments of "Computer Science and Engineering", " Electronics, Automation and System Engineering", and "System Engineering and Automation". He has been also "stagiere" at the Laboratoire d'Automatique et d'Analyse des Systemes(LAAS-CNRS),Toulouse, France (1979), and visiting scientist (1990-1991) at the " Robotics Institute", Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Since December 1992 he is Full Professor at the University of Seville where he has been Vice-Director of the Engineering School. He is currently leading GRVC with more than 70 members at the School of Engineeringand the Association of Research and Industrial Cooperation of Andalucía (AICIA). He is currently Scientific Advisor of the Center for Advanced Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) with more than 70 members and has been Scientific Director of this Center.
He researched in autonomous aerial systems, robotics and automation, presenting the results in more than 560 PUBLICATIONS, including papers in journals (128), book chapters (38), and Conference Proceedings. He is author or co-author of 8 books including a book on computer control "Premio Mundo Electrónico" (Spanish Award), a book on robotics, the book "Intelligent Mobile Robot Navigation" (Springer, 2005), a book on "Teleoperation and Telerobotics" (Pearson- Prentice Hall, 2006) and a book on autonomous and distributed systems for applications on vehicles and natural environments (2008). Furthermore, he is editor or co-editor of 12 books including Multiple Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Springer, 2007, translated to Chinese in 2012), with 9 Chapters being co-author of 6, and "Cooperating Objects and Wireless Sensor Networks" (Hermes, 2007) with 6 Chapters being co-author of 3 Chapters.
He has led or participated in more than 140 research and development PROJECTS, including 24 projects funded by the European Commission and other projects funded by NASA, the Spanish National Research Program, the Regional Research Program, and many institutions and companies.
He has been coordinator of the successful European projects "Real-time coordination and control of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles" (COMETS) in the 5th Framework Programme, with 7 partners from 5 countries, and "Platform for Autonomous self-deploying and operation of Wireless sensor-actuator networks cooperating with AeRial objEcts" (AWARE), in the 6th Framework Programme, with 8 partners of 5 European countries, that were evaluated as excellent achieving all his objectives. Recently, he has been associated coordinator of the Network of Excellence on Cooperating Objects (CONET).
CTU in Prague
Tomáš Svoboda is currently full Professor and the Chair of the Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague. He serves as the Director of Cybernetics and Robotics PhD study program, and he is also on the Board of the Open Informatics programme. He received the Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence and biocybernetics from the Czech Technical University (CTU), Prague, Czech Republic, in 2000. He spent three post-doctoral years with the Computer Vision Group, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He has published articles on multicamera systems, omnidirectional cameras, image-based retrieval, learnable detection methods, and machine learning in robotic navigation. He has led CTU-CRAS-NORLAB team at the DARPA SubTerranean Challenge. His recent research interests include multimodal perception for autonomous systems, and related applications in the automotive industry.
Delft University of Technology
Guido de Croon received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His research interest lies with computationally efficient, bio-inspired algorithms for robot autonomy. Since 2008 he has worked on algorithms for achieving autonomous flight with small and light-weight flying robots, such as the DelFly flapping wing MAV. In 2011-2012, he was a research fellow in the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency, where he studied topics such as optical flow based control algorithms for extraterrestrial landing scenarios. After his return at TU Delft, his work has included fully autonomous flight of a 20-gram DelFly, a new theory on active distance perception with optical flow, and a swarm of tiny drones able to explore unknown environments. His research on autonomous swarms of tiny drones first focused on providing the basic capabilities for the swarm members to localize with respect to each other. Recently, this research has expanded to navigating in unknown environments with the help of bug algorithms, and performing complex tasks such as gas source localization. Currently, he is Full Professor at TU Delft and scientific lead of the Micro Air Vehicle lab (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology.
Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione
He studies collective behaviour and distributed cognition, applying the insights from biological systems to the engineering of artificial ones. In particular, he works with robot swarms and he participated to the most important European projects in the field, namely Swarm-bots and Swarmanoid.
His research interests span over self-organisation, complex systems, collective adaptive systems, swarm robotics and evolutionary robotics. The latter subject has been his main research focus in the past. Otherwise, he mainly studies distributed cognitive systems in general, and swarm robotics systems in particular.
His research team focuses on a variety of collective systems composed of interacting agents, spanning from neurons/neuroglia in the brain to people in a crowd, from insects in a colony to robots in a swarm. The overarching aim is to understand how cognitive processes like attention, decision making or categorisation emerge in a system from the numerous interactions among the system components, possibly organised in complex network topologies. The insights gathered in this endeavour are exploited to synthesise cyber-physical systems like robot swarms and cognitive radio networks to optimally deal with the complexity inherent to real-world applications.
University of Coimbra
Lino Marques received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 2005. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Coimbra and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Systems and Robotics, where he heads the Field Robotics group. He has been Principal Investigator of his research team in several European projects. He is Editor-in-Chief for Robots and Multi-Robot Systems of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. His primary research interest is in mobile robot olfaction, although he has concurrent research in multiple robotics sub-areas, including multi-robotic systems, robotics for hazardous environments and field and service robotics.
Boston University
Alyssa Pierson is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. Prior to that, she was a research scientist working for Professor Daniela Rus at MIT. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University in January 2017, and was a visiting student at Stanford University during 2016. She joined BU in May 2012 to work in the Multi-Robot Systems Lab with Prof. Mac Schwager. Her research interests are focused on the coordination and control of multi-robot systems, particularly in heterogeneous groups.
Prior to starting graduate school, she worked for several years at Cobham, plc in the Graduate Development Program. This rotational program gave her experience in both engineering and project management at the industrial level. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College in 2010.
In her free time, she is an avid skier, cyclist, SCUBA diver, and photographer.
Multi-Robot Systems Group, FEE CTU
Deployment of large teams of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in real-world (outdoor and indoor) environments without precise external localisation or motion capture systems is very challenging. I will present the latest results of our endeavor towards fully autonomous compact flocks of MAVs with onboard artificial intelligence, which was achieved by the Multi-robot Systems group at the Czech Technical University in Prague together with Vijay Kumar Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Stabilization, control, and motion planning techniques for steering swarms and formations of unmanned MAVs will be discussed in the talk. We shall focus on biologically inspired techniques that integrate swarming abilities of individual particles with a Model Predictive Control (MPC) methodology respecting the fast dynamics of unmanned quadrotors. Besides the basic principles of formation flying and swarm stabilization, examples of real-world applications of the introduced methods will be shown in complex indoor and outdoor experiments. First, we show how we use MAVs for indoor documentation of large historical objects (cathedrals) by formations of cooperating MAVs, where one MAV carries a camera and its neighbors carry light sources with the possibility to set a relative angle between the camera axis and the lights as required. Second, we demonstrate cooperative manipulation of large objects by a pair of MAVs developed for the international MBZIRC competition. Last, we present the fully autonomous flying robot Eagle.one hunting for unauthorized drones.
The Summer School 2022 session will cover the week of August 1-5, beginning with initial introductions and registration and culminating on the final day's event of an outdoor experiment and competition using knowledge acquired during the week with real robots. The official program is available in PDF here.
GROUP 1+2
Registration (for later coming possible during the day)
Martin Saska - welcome and organizational details
Aníbal Ollero Baturone part I
Coffee break
Aníbal Ollero Baturone part II
GROUP 1
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
Martin Saska - Research of groups of aerial robots at CTU in Prague
GROUP 2
Martin Saska - Research of groups of aerial robots at CTU in Prague
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
GROUP 1+2
Tomáš Báča - Introduction into MRS system in ROS
Coffee break
Pavel Petráček/Vít Krátký/Tomáš Báča - Practical seminar tasks introduction
Workshop (Practicals in group)
Social program: Welcome drink
GROUP 1+2
Registration (for later coming)
Vito Trianni part I - Collective Decisions in Robot Swarms
Coffee break
Vito Trianni part II - Collective Decisions in Robot Swarms
GROUP 1
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
Practical in PC lab (simulations in Gazebo)
GROUP 2
Practical in PC lab (simulations in Gazebo)
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
GROUP 1+2
Guido de Croon - Autonomous swarms of tiny drones
Coffee break
Tomáš Svoboda - Robots go deep - multi-robot missions in unknown undergrounds
Social program: Prague's guided tours
GROUP 1+2
Registration (for later coming)
Rachid Alami part I
Coffee break
Rachid Alami part II
GROUP 1
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
Practical in PC lab (simulations in Gazebo)
GROUP 2
Practical in PC lab (simulations in Gazebo)
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
GROUP 1+2
Lino Marques part I - Basic terms and MRS approaches
Coffee break
Lino Marques part II - Multi-robot olfactory search
Konstantinos Alexis - CERBERUS in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge: A Quest for Resilient Autonomy
Social event: Banquet
GROUP 1+2
Registration (for later coming)
Short presentations of students, part I
Coffee break
Alyssa Pierson - Designing Cooperative Multi-Agent Teams and Socially-Aware Autonomy
GROUP 1
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
Practical in PC lab (simulations in Gazebo)
Lab tour
Coffee break
Briefing on the experimental part & organizational details & safety instructions
GROUP 2
Practical in PC lab (simulations in Gazebo)
Lunch
Free Time/Networking/Beer
Briefing on the experimental part & organizational details & safety instructions
Coffee break
Lab tour
GROUP 1+2
Short presentations of students, part II
Outdoor experiments with awards announcement
Outdoor lunch
