Undergraduate student team from MARS Lab won one first prize in “Challenge Cup” National Undergraduate Curricular Academic Science and Technology Works (Shanghai division) and they will participant the national competition on behalf of Shanghai later this year. The members include Zehao Zhao, Xiting Zhao, Yiming Yin, Zhihao Zhang, Zhijie Yang and Hankai Liu and they are supervised by Prof. Sören Schwertfeger. Their topic is about SLAM rescue robots suitable for all terrain. The robot is designed to collect data in post-disaster environments inappropriate for rescue crews either automaticly or by remote control. Motion detection, thermal imaging and carbon dioxide sensors are also attached to it to get more information. The idea of this project is comes from their Robocup Rescue Robot participation, which is also supervised by Prof. Schwertfeger. The Shanghaitech Student Innovation Center also gives a lot of support on this project.

(Images: click here)

The MARS group was participating at the RoboCup German Open 2019 with our small rescue robot. The six students and Prof. Schwertfeger went to Magdeburg, Germany with two robots. For a new team we performed very well, scoring points in every run. In July we will participate in the RoboCup Worldcup 2019 in Sydney, Australia. The lessons learned at the German Open will help us to prepare.

(Images and Video: click here)

The MARS Lab student Yijun Yuan 元祎君 went to Singapore to present our paper Fast Gaussian Process Occupancy Maps (PDF) at the International Conference on Control Automation Robotics & Vision (ICARCV). 

Yijun in Singapore 

Prof. Schwertfeger was invited to give a talk (in German) about AI research in China at the Petersberger Gesrpäche 2018. This is a very high-profile conference for IT and Research Executives organized by the Comma Soft AG, a german IT consulting company. The conference was held at Villa Hammerschmidt, the (second) official seat of the German president. 

The Shanghai Education Television Network (上海教育电视台) on April 13 aired an episode of a Science TV show called "Open the Mind" (打开吧脑洞). It starred three Professors, among them Prof. Schwertfeger from the MARS lab. He talked about the mapping robot and rescue robotics. The episode was actually already filmed in winter 2017.

In order to avoid confusion with the STAR Center, the lab of Prof. Sören Schwertfeger has been renamed to "Mobile Autonomous Robotic Systems Lab - MARS Lab". Formerly it was referred to as the STAR Lab. The new Chinese name of the lab is:  自主移动机器人实验室