EUROPA

The autonomous intelligent systems (AIS) lab of the University of Freiburg is concerned with techniques for autonomous navigation, state estimation, and control in the context of mobile robotics and artificial intelligence. One of the major research areas covered by this lab is mobile robot navigation.

The Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich ETHZ is an internationally renowned research lab in the field of autonomous robot design and navigation. It has a large experience in the design and autonomous navigation of wheeled and flying autonomous robots for different kinds of environments.

The team of KU Leuven that will work on the project is part of the Center for the Processing of Speech and Images (PSI), one of the units within the department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT). This team - VISICS (VISion for Industry, Communications, and Services) - is specialized in computer vision and its applications, and focuses on the sub-domains of 3D acquisition and modeling, as well as on object and object class recognition.

Two groups of the University of Oxford, namely the Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) and the Computational Linguistics Group (CLG) are involved in EUROPA. The MRG has an international reputation in the area of robot navigation especially when it comes to operating in outdoor environments with well engineered vehicles and complex real-time software. Complementing the information theoretic research within MRG, the group possesses a strong culture of in-field experimental validation. The CLG at Oxford provides an environment in which postdoctoral workers and doctoral students work together on a wide variety of projects including several FP6 projects. The CLG has good connections with related groups in the university, including Robotics, Linguistics and Phonetics, as well as the nearby Sharp Research labs. Much recent work has combined traditional, knowledge-based approaches with statistical and machine learning methods.

BlueBotics SA is a Swiss SME located in Lausanne. It is a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) founded in 2001 with the mission to market innovative and promising mobile robotics technologies. BlueBotics's domain of expertise covers the engineering of mechatronic systems including integration, design, prototyping, and production. BlueBotics has full control over the development of the whole range of products, allowing for rapid reaction to custom requirements with competitive prices.

The Mobile Multimedia group at RWTH Aachen University has been newly founded with the goal of performing basic research and developing applications in visual object recognition and tracking from mobile devices and robotic platforms.