The VRAS group has successfully helped the global open-source robotics community by implementing the first plausible simulation model of tracked vehicles. The model has just been made available to everyone as part of the Gazebo simulator Among others, it will help the CRAS-CTU team in the global DARPA SubT challenge where a team of robots …read more

Dean’s Award for the Dissertation thesis was given to

Ing. Vladimír Kubelka successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled Improving perception and locomotion capabilities of mobile robots in urban search and rescue missions (supervisor: doc. Ing. Tomáš Svoboda, Ph.D., supervisor specialist: Ing. Michal Reinštein, Ph.D.). Congratulations!

We are partners in a new European research project (CHIST-ERA call) IPALM – Interactive Perception-Action-Learning for Modelling Objects coordinated by Imperial College London. Matej Hoffmann is the PI for our part. The objective of the project is to develop methods for the automatic digitization of objects and their physical properties by exploratory manipulations. The methods …read more

Matěj Hoffmann is co-organizing a workshop at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems IROS2018. BODIS: The utility of body, interaction and self learning in robotics.

Work in collaboration with IIT Genoa and Yale University on Compact real-time avoidance on a humanoid robot for human-robot interaction appeared at the HRI 2018 Conference held in Chicago. [pdf @ arxiv | youtube video]

A typical feature of mammals lies in their ability to experience sensations, something that robots are beginning to imitate. With the help of artificial skins and algorithms, our researchers have managed to make a small humanoid robot aware of human contact and even notice if someone is invading his ‘living’ space. The little android with …read more

Ing. Tomáš Petříček successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled Coupled Learning and Planning for Active 3D Mapping (supervisor: doc. Ing. Tomáš Svoboda, Ph.D.). Congratulations!

Matěj Hoffmann from the group Vision for Robotics Autonomous Systems (VRAS) was a member of the team who won the Kuka Innovation Award 2018, see the video.

The project RobotBodySchema (or “Robot self-calibration and safe physical human-robot interaction inspired by body representations in primate brains”), investigated by the team of Mgr. Matej Hoffmann, Ph.D., became a Partnering project of the Human Brain Project. Congratulations!

Karel Zimmermann presents at ICCV 2017 paper K. Zimmermann, T. Petricek, V. Salansky, T. Svoboda. Learning for Active 3D Mapping.

Ing. Vladimir Kubelka, a PhD. student of Artificial inteligence and biocybernetics, presented a rescue mobile robot Charlie, which is involved in project TRADR, and invited the viewers to the “Night of scientists“(in czech only) in Studio 6, a Czech TV morning show. Many thanks for the representation of our faculty!

Zdenek Straka and Matej Hoffmann were awarded ENNS Best Paper Award at 26th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN17) for their paper Learning a Peripersonal Space Representation as a Visual-Tactile Prediction Task.

Karel Zimmermann has successfully defended his habilitation thesis Safe Adaptive Traversability with Incomplete Data. Congratulation!

Assoc. Prof. Tomáš Svoboda (Vision for Robotics and Autonomous Systems) was a guest on CT24 speaking on the topic: USA: Shared Autonomous Transport in 13 Years? (the interview in Czech language only starts at about 0:15:56).

A 4-page cover story about humanoid robotics in Respekt (a major Czech weekly journal), 16/2017. Matej Hoffmann and Zdenek Straka interviewed and photographed with robots. More robots mentioned in the electronic version of the story. The printed version also available at ihned.cz.

A rescue ground robot is going to Italy after earthquake. Real deployment event featured in Czech TV main news. Department is collaborating with CIIRC within TRADR project.

Enable-S3 is a large ECSEL-JU project called European Initiative to Enable Validation for Highly Automated Safe and Secure Systems. Tomas Svoboda is the PI of the CTU part. We will closely collaborate with ValeoCZ working on boosting rare data into the learning and testing in automatic driving.

Tomáš Svoboda discussed on DVTV with Martin Veselovský the future of transportation systems and autonomous vehicles (in Czech). Many thanks for successful representation of our department!

Paper of authors K. Zimmermann, T. Petricek, V. Salansky, and T. Svoboda was accepted as oral presentation at ICCV 2017! We propose an active 3D mapping method for depth sensors, which allow individual control of depth-measuring rays, such as the newly emerging solid-state lidars. The method simultaneously (i) learns to reconstruct a dense 3D occupancy …read more

The successively evaluated features used in a sliding window detection process to decide about object presence/absence also contain knowledge about object deformation. We exploit these detection features to estimate the object deformation. Estimated deformation is then immediately applied to not yet evaluated features to align them with the observed image data. In our approach, the …read more

We design and evaluate a data fusion system for localization of a mobile skid-steer robot intended for USAR missions. We exploit a rich sensor suite including both proprioceptive (inertial measurement unit and tracks odometry) and exteroceptive sensors (omnidirectional camera and rotating laser rangefinder). To cope with the specificities of each sensing modality (such as significantly …read more

Adaptive traversability we understand by means of autonomous motion control adapting the robot morphology—configuration of articulated parts and their compliance—to traverse unknown complex terrain with obstacles in an optimal way. The robot measures its state (like: orientation angles, flipper mode, …) and the terrain (digital elevation model). We learn the optimal policy from loosely annotated …read more