Our paper “Teaching Robots to Perceive Time: A Twofold Learning Approach”, authored by Inês Lourenço, myself, and Bo Wahlberg, received the best paper and the best student awards at the ICDL-EpiRob 2020 conference.

The Op-ed is available in Portuguese here: https://ionline.sapo.pt/artigo/706090/-spacex-e-marte?seccao=Opini%C3%A3o

The Portuguese radio show “90 segundos de ciência” has recently featured our research on Space Robotics, namely the SPHERES formation control sessions on the International Space Station and our current focus on in-space assembly and manufacturing using free-flyer robots.

Podcast here (in Portuguese): https://www.rtp.pt/play/p2936/e482743/90-segundos-ciencia

The MEROP team has been selected, among 16 experiments, to the upcoming Mars analog simulation AMADEE-20 in Oct/Nov 2020 in Israel.   The team was proposed by Rodrigo Ventura, José Corujeira, Rute Luz, e José Luís Silva do ITI (Interactive Technologies Institute/LARSyS), and will participate in collaboration with TU Gratz. The experiment is focused on the field evaluation of a multimodal robot teleoperation interface designed by the team. The AMADEE-20 is a collaboration among the Israeli Space Agency, the D-MARS agency, and the Austrian Space Forum. The mission control center will be located in Austria, while the base will be at the Negav desert in Israel.

More info at https://oewf.org/en/2019/11/amadee-20-science-experiments/

João Cartucho, a former MSc student co-supervised by Manuela Veloso and me, was finalist to the Best Paper Award at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018), with a paper entitled “Robust Object Recognition through Symbiotic Deep Learning in Mobile Robots”.

“A joint research team from Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), and from the Space Systems Laboratory from MIT (SSL-MIT), was responsible for an experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) that took place in August 17th, 2018.” [more]

Exame Informática, a Portuguese news outlet focused on science and technology, has just featured an article on the formation control experiment we are involved, in collaboration with the MIT’s Space Systems Laboratory. The experiment is scheduled to take place in August 16th, 2018. The experiment will run on the NASA SPHERES free-flying robots that are operational on the International Space Station (ISS) since 2006.

The SocRob@Home team received the Best-in-class award of  “Getting to know my home” task benchmark of the European Robotics League – Service Robots (ERL-SR), during banquet and awards ceremony of the the European Robotics Forum (ERF) in Tampere (Finland), at March 14th, 2018. In this task the robot is required to generate a map of its environment and detect random changes in the location of furniture and other items that will be made before each task.

The robot ‘Gasparzinho’ received in May 16th an honorable mention awarded by the Exame Informática magazine. This robot was developed in the EU FP7 MOnarCH project, coordinated by IST, targeting edutainment activities with children patients in the IPOL oncological hospital in Lisbon. The robot has also been used in other research projects, including the CMU-Portugal ERI INSIDE, on the use of autonomous robots in therapeutic sessions with ASD children, the FCT HARODE project, on human-aware service robot for domestic environments, and one of its siblings, developed by IDMind (a partner of the MOnarCH project), is a permanent resident at the Pavilion of Knowledge science museum, where it is welcoming visitors and interacting with them.