INESC TEC researcher receives ABB Award for his master’s thesis

Ricardo Barbosa, researcher at the Centre for Robotics in Industry and Intelligent Systems (CRIIS), received the “ABB Award”, awarded by ABB (Asea Brown Boveri) SA, within the scope of his thesis Odometry and Extrinsic Sensor Calibration on Mobile Robots. The work, developed at CRIIS, and part of the Master in Electrical and Computers Engineering, by the Faculty of Engineering of the U.Porto, received the final mark of 19 out of 20.

The thesis focused on the extrinsic calibration of sensors and odometry in mobile robotics, using optimisation algorithms. The extrinsic calibration aimed to estimate the parameters that define a 2D laser referential to a robot referential, with said parameters influencing the precision of the laser data processing in different tasks, like mapping or obstacle detection. As for the calibration of odometry, it allows adjusting parameters such as wheels’ diameter or their distance to the robot’s geometric centre, in order to improve the robot’s odometry, i.e., the estimate of the robot’s relative movement.

According to Ricardo Barbosa, “the ABB award highlights all the work I carried out at CRIIS, in partnership with my advisors, Professor António Paulo and Dr. Marcelo Petry. This work allowed improving the accuracy of location and mapping algorithms, which leads to advances in autonomous robot navigation“.

Each year, the “ABB Award” acknowledges an Integrated Master student who obtained the highest mark in a master’s thesis on the following themes: Industrial Automation, Robotics, Home Automation, Motors and Speed Variation.

The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC.