Since its first year, Innovation Week has systematically focused on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), and this year this topic will be given special attention with regard to the use of AI in everyday life. During the discussion panels, many leading experts will focus on its role in business, startups and society as a whole. The main programme will take place on Tuesday 10 October and will feature a team of roboticists and computer scientists from the Department of Computing, the Artificial Intelligence Centre and the Department of Cybernetics. There will also be an expert lecture by Prof. Tomáš Svoboda, the head of the CTU-CRAS-NORLAB robotics team, who famously represented FEL CTU at the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge "Robot Olympics" organized by the US government agency
The main part of the program for CTU FEL includes participation in the Innovation Fair, where the team prepared its walking quadruped robot SPOT with a robotic arm as the biggest attraction, which significantly expanded the possibilities of research on autonomous manipulation without human supervision, an area among the least explored areas of contemporary robotics. A team of roboticists and computer scientists from FEL CTU has developed several projects in which robots sense their surroundings and interact with their environment. An example is the deployment of mobile robots for exploration and inspection of previously unknown areas, where they can be used in cooperation with rescue workers or in building communication infrastructure in challenging conditions without GPS signal. At the exhibition stand there will be an opportunity to get acquainted with selected walking and tracked robots that can actively interact with the environment and move independently in both familiar and unfamiliar environments. Visitors will be able to get a glimpse into the robots' perspective, find out how they perceive their environment and what factors influence their decision-making.
Professor Tomas Svoboda's lecture entitled "Autonomous robots in the service of humans: current opportunities and main challenges" will present the basic building blocks of autonomous robots and one possible definition of their intelligence. It will also focus on what current robots can and cannot do and what we still need to see to make them widely accepted in everyday life. The talk, which will take place on October 10 at 4:00 pm in the Einstein Seminar Room, will also present the limitations of current control algorithms that require large amounts of training data and show one possible way to overcome these limitations.
