Laboratory
for Robotics and Intelligent Control SystemsWelcome to the LARICS Home Page!
LARICS - The Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems is a research laboratory within the Department of Control and Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, The University of Zagreb.
Here we present information about our activities, achievements and plans. Learn about our research projects, browse through our personal pages, discover what opportunities we may possibly offer to you. As a control people, we would appreciate receiving your feedback.
May 15, 2013 - Prof. Fierro visited LARICS
| During his short visit to our Faculty, where he came to be a part of the committee for defense of Damjan Miklic's doctoral dissertation, he also found time to visit the ACROSS laboratory and LARICS laboratory and talk to young researchers working there. It should be mentioned that prof. Fierro was PhD advisor of Ivana Palunko and Domagoj Tolic, and the host of Damjan Miklic during his Fulbright fellowship spent in the prof. Fierro's lab. Prof. Fierro expressed his willingness to explore possibilities of further collaboration between two laboratories. |  |
May 14, 2013 - Prof. Rafael Fierro held the lecture “Synchronization Strategies for Robotic Networks”
 | Dr. Rafael Fierro, professor at the University of New Mexico, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Albuquerque, USA, held a very interesting lecture on synchronization strategies for robotic networks. As Prof. Fierro said, robotic networks are particularly well suited to execute tasks that cover wide geographic ranges, require significant parallelization, and/or depend on capabilities that are varied in both quantity and difficulty. Example applications include littoral exploration and surveillance, rainforest health monitoring, autonomous transportation systems, warehouse automation, and hazardous waste clean-up. This talk focused on synchronization strategies to control robotic networks. First some of the projects at the MARHES Lab were outlined including work on agile transportation of suspended loads using aerial robots and coordination of heterogeneous robotic networks. Then a multi-vehicle test bed and its applications were presented. Also, recent work on two problems was described: (1) detecting changes in the topology of a robotic network through synchronization of nonlinear oscillators, and (2) coordinating a team of nonholonomic sensors using a binary consensus protocol. |
May 13, 2013 - Damjan Miklic defended his doctoral dissertation
 | Damjan Miklic successfully defended his doctoral dissertation and received a Doctor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. Damjan's thesis was entitled "Grid-based coordinated control of mobile robot formations". The main results of his work are new algorithms and methods for creation, maintenance and change of formations for a group of autonomous ground mobile robots using a matrix model of a system and a grid-based model of the space in which robots are moving, together with simulation and experimental results obtained after application of these methods. |
May 11, 2013 - LARICS was present at the Festival of Technical Culture in Zagreb
| Croatian Association of Technological Culture (CROTEC) organized the 1st Festival of Technical Culture that was held in Bocarski dom in Zagreb. LARICS team (Damjan, Frano, Anja, Kruno, Mihael, Zdenko) was invited to participate at the Festival on behalf of the Croatian Robotics Association. We have presented new achievements with humanoid robots NAO - playing a board game tic-tac-toe, and reading a text printed on the A4 paper. Also, we presented few loveble features like tracking the person in red, walking the robot by hand and some others. Large interest shown by the visitors, especially kids, proved again that robotics is a best possible magnet for young generations. |  |
April 26, 2013 - LARICS Workshop at the Science Festival
| LARICS team of 7 people and 5 NAO robots held a workshop at the Technical Museum as a part of Science Festival 2013. Workshop named „Humanoid robots – partners in/at(?) work and play“ was organized by Professor Zdenko Kovacic, Damjan Miklic and Frano Petric, with help from Anja Babic, Tamara Petrovic, Kruno Hrvatinic and Mihael Mercvajler. While Anja, Tamara and Kruno demonstrated some of the built-in functionalities of NAO robots, Damjan and Frano assisted two of our NAOs to display their skills in playing the tic-tac-toe game, which attracted a lot of attention from mainly young visitors. Mihael was also very busy successfully demonstrating his interesting work on teaching a NAO robot to read. We had a lot of fun and hope that our visitors enjoyed the workshop too. Album with photos from the workshop can be seen on the Facebook page of Science Festival. We will be back next year, see you again at the Science Festival 2014. |   |
April 23, 2013 - Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic visited FER
| Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic and his team visited our Faculty to express support to the initiative of building a new Faculty Innovation Center which would employ young doctors of science in order to boost the Croatian ICT and EE industry by delivering advanced and competitive solutions for future globally concurrent products. For this purpose, the exhibition of a dozen of innovations developed at FER was prepared and one of the exhibits was the exploration and inspection robot for fire fighting units developed in our Lab. The interest which the Prime Minister showed in the robot and the attention of media motivate us to keep searching for funds to continue development of this robot. |  |
April 15, 2013 - LARICS and Hrid signed three R&D contracts for development of new robots
LARICS and our industrial partner Hrid NDT Zagreb signed three contracts for R&D collaboration on robots for inspection tasks in nuclear power plants. The first contract is about development of the control system of the RCP manipulator for ultrasonic testing of welds of the main pump in the VVER-1200 nuclear power plant. The second one deals with development of control software for SGIS-D manipulator used for testing of pipes of a steam generator. The third one is concerned with development of control of the RPV manipulator for inspection of the reactor vessel VVER-1200.
April 15, 2013 - LARICS and Inteco Zagreb signed new R&D contract - Robot R-JET 111
Starting on April 15, 2013 LARICS and Inteco Robotics Zagreb signed the contract with a goal to develop a robot R-JET 111 for hydrodynamic treatment of algae in the channel of the Thermal Power Plant Plomin. R-JET 111 is a remotely controlled robot which will operate on a 2 km long channel that connects TPP Plomin and the Adriatic sea. The LARICS research team is responsible for development, implementation and testing of the control system for R-JET 111.
March 27, 2013 - LARICS team visited FP7-IP EC-SAFEMOBIL project partner Euroimpianti
 | LARICS team consisting of prof. Zdenko Kovacic, Damjan Miklic and Frano Petric visited Euroimpianti headquarters in Schio, Italy. The purpose of the visit was to discuss further collaboration on the FP7 project EC-SAFEMOBIL, specifically to arrange the technical details of localization tests that are to be performed in Euroimpianti facilites in the beginning of May. Along with the localization tests, industrial requirements for a warehousing scenario were discussed to clarify the needs of Euroimpianti and solutions proposed by LARICS. We thank our partners at Euroimpianti for a warm welcome, very productive sessions and very inspiring tour of their facilities. |
March 22, 2013 - ASSISI project presented to FER Faculty
Professor Bogdan presented the ASSISI project to FER faculty in a one-hour talk. The talk, staged as part of the ACROSS Colloquia lecture series, filled the TCR auditorium up to the last seat, setting a new record for Colloquia attendance.
