News
The Croatian Innovator Association, together with the Nikola Tesla Innovation Center, organized a conference with the title "Smart agriculture - use of the technologies in agriculture" on October 18, 2018. Matko Orsag took part in the conference with a presentation entitled "Autonomous Robots in Indoor Agriculture", presenting the new ideas and concepts developed and worked on as part of the Specularia project and LARICS' research. Further details on the conference can be found by following this link, whereas Marko Orsag's presentation can be seen its entirety here.
Our new robotic arm has just arrived at the Laboratory, which is great news for the project, as it means that we will now be able to continue our efforts and start working on new things. This compliant multi-degree-of-freedom manipulator has the task of performing delicate handling of plants, such as flower and fruit manipulation, and plant pruning. It will work together with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), and these three robots will together form a system which can be applied to achieve versatile goals in an unstructured environment, which an indoor organic farm most certainly is.
Our hardworking team members went to Madrid to attend another International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) to present their own, the project's and the Lab's work. LARICS members, including our Matko Orsag, Marsela Polić and Antun Ivanović were in Spain from 1st to 5th October and actively participated in the conference. Marsela and Matko took part in a workshop for Specularia and Antun presented an article titled: "Impedance based force control for aerial robot peg-in-hole insertion tasks".
Together with our partners from MORUS, the specularia team worked hard to present an Impedance based force control for aerial robot peg-in-hole insertion tasks. Our team developed inverse kinematic solution and workspace analysis as well as the control for the arms attached to the body of the UAV. This type of robot could be used for planting and soil inspection. Feel free to read more about this experiment in the paper and we are looking forward to seeing you this September in Madrid.
We are very proud to announce that five young researchers have defended their Bachelor Theses covering topics related to the project Specularia. Our students have demonstrated a strong interest, devotion and above all knowledge to tackle challenging topics ranging from soft robotic sensors, constrained UAV trajectory planning, all the way to heterogeneous robotic system mission planning. Our first master student also graduated this year, tackling the problem of heterogenous robotic system behavior based modelling.
Project specularia officially started June 1st 2018. This 5 year long project is supported by Croatian Science Foundation under the project number UIP-2017-05-4042. The goal of the project is to support the establishment of new research groups of young scientists in order to accelerate establishment of independent research careers after obtaining the PhD award. Establishment of research groups that will work on innovative research topics. Project specularia aims to utilize heterogeneous robotic team in order to help build the greenhouse farms of the future.