UNIZG-FER

UNIZG-FER is a team of the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER). FER is the leading national and regional research and higher education institution with excellent teachers and students, closely connected with the economy, excellently organized and internationally recognized. The team consists of two laboratories - LARICS (Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems) and LABUST (Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies). Therefore, it has a lot of experience in both aerial and marine applications of robotics. Together they have successfully carried out over 70 scientific research projects funded by the European Union (EC Horizon 2020, EU FP7), the NATO Science for Peace program and national scientific institutions such as the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports or the Croatian Science Foundation.

The team is comprised of 6 professors, 4 postdocs, 12 PhD students, and 2 mechanical engineers. Over the years, the team has gained extensive experience in the field of unmanned aerial systems, control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems, navigation, guidance and control, vehicle design, and human-robot interaction. The team has already participated in robotics competitions, starting with the European Robotics Challenges, a research project funded by the EU FP7 program, where they placed 3rd overall. The developed technology was transferred to a separate EU-H2020 project AeroWind. They also participated in the European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency Local Tournament in Seville, Spain, February 18-23, 2019, where they achieved great results - winning first place overall and best ground team. This performance also secured them the ERL Emergency Best Team of Season 2018/2019 award.

The LARICS team participated in the 2020 edition of the MBZIRC international robotics competition (https://larics-mbzirc.fer.hr/index.php/mbzirc2020/). Throughout the competition, the team solved all challenges in autonomous mode. The overall results over the four days of the competition were as follows:

Challenge 1: Intercepting an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) performing a figure-eight trajectory at a speed of up to 8 m/s and destroying the balloons in the arena - 15th out of 22 teams.

Challenge 2: Cooperative wall building with UAVs and a ground robot - 5th out of 19 teams.

Challenge 3: Firefighting task with simulated fires in a high-rise building - 7th out of 20 teams.

Grand Challenge: all tasks from each challenge running simultaneously - 14th out of 17 teams.

The driving force of this team is its talented and enthusiastic researchers, drawing on years of experience and guided by top researchers in the field of aerial manipulation and marine robotics. Previous competitive experience gives this team a good dose of confidence and strategic thinking needed to overcome this type of challenge.