Martin Saska presents Participation of CTU in Prague at the MBZIRC 2017 competition

Participation of Czech Technical University in Prague at the MBZIRC 2017
competition: system description, lessons learned, deployment of the system
beyond the MBZIRC

The aim of the presentation is to share experience gained during our
participation at the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge
(MBZIRC), where our team won gold medal in the third challenge, silver medal in
the first challenge and bronze medal in the GRAND-challenge. MBZIRC
(http://mbzirc.com/) is an international robotics competition organized every
two years in Abu Dhabi by Sheikh Hamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan with total prize and
team sponsorship of USD 5 Million, which attracts the best robotic universities
in the world (143 teams applied for participation in the contest). Our team
primarily participated in the Challenge 1, autonomous landing of a helicopter
(UAV) on a moving vehicle, and the Challenge 3, in which three cooperating UAVs
search, locate, track, pick and place a set of static and moving objects.

In the first part of the talk, a short introduction into the system (SW and HW)
will be provided with a focus on the novel onboard model predictive
control-based trajectory tracker and state automata designed to solve the
Challenges 1 and 3 of the competition. In the second part, the experimental
deployment of our MBZIRC platform in other research projects will be shown.
Finally, plans for further exploitation of the achieved results and consequent
research directions will be discussed.