Maria Lopes, researcher at INESC TEC, won the competition that ended the Robotics Summer School organised by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), in Zurich. The ETH Robotics Summer School 2024 included – in addition to a series of sessions that aimed to teach participants fundamental concepts of robotics – a competition won by the team of the INESC TEC researcher.
SuperMegaBot – a robot developed by ETH Zurich within the scope of different research projects, featuring various sensors like LiDAR, IMU and cameras to locate objects and move around autonomously. This was the robot that the participants had to operate. The goal? To autonomously explore a maze and identify key objects.
Out of eight teams of various nationalities, the team featuring the INESC TEC researcher Maria Lopes – composed of five more people – won the competition. There were four robots, which meant that each team had to share one robot. Everyone had the same hardware, as well as a common software base, where each team could make the changes they wanted.
The ETH Robotics Summer School welcomed a total of 46 students – 36 master’s degree students and 10 PhD students -, half of whom belonging to ETH; the other half were international students. In all, 288 students applied to this week-long Summer School at the Centre d’Instruction des Troupes de Sauvetage à Epeisses, in Geneva.
According to Maria Lopes “it was a rewarding experience that allowed me to have contact with state-of-the-art developments in the field of mobile robotics, and to learn from prestigious researchers in my areas of interest”.
Topics like state estimation, location and mapping, path planning, trajectory optimisation and object detection were also part of other stages of this Summer School, through theoretical sessions or tutorials in simulated environments.
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