Who you gonna call? Iberian Robotics!
Instituto Superior Técnico (represented by IPFN, through Alberto Vale, and ISR) together with the University of Seville and FADA-CATEC (Advanced Center for Aerospace Technologies), participated in the Mohamed bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC 2020) as a team – The Iberian Robotics.
The MBZIRC 2020 event consists of a series of challenges – aimed at overcoming technological limits in robotics – involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs).
The Técnico team was the winner of Challenge 3, where UAVs and a UGV collaborated to autonomously extinguish a series of simulated fires in an urban high rise building firefighting scenario. Challenge 3 is motivated by the use of robots for urban firefighting, and requires the team of robots to collaborate to autonomously carry out a series of urban firefighting related tasks in an outdoor-indoor environment.
Intelligent solutions used for remote handling activities developed for ITER and DEMO were also used to implement algorithms for the UGV navigation and localization.
The team is composed of seven elements, coordinated by researchers Alberto Vale and Meysam Basiri, and includes three scholarship holders (João Gonçalves, José Rosa and Rui Bettencourt) and one technical assistant (Tiago Cardoso). Professor Pedro Lima is the project mentor and the coordinator of ISR’s Intelligent Robots and Systems group.
This robotics challenge was organised by Khalifa University and took place in Abu-Dhabi, from 21-27 February 2020.
