Reports

Being able to move autonomously in an unknown cramped environment and create its detailed map. This is the role of a six-legged walking robot whose “brain” was programmed by our researcher and PhD student Jan Bayer. For his precisely elaborated diploma project with great societal potential "Autonomous Exploration of Unknown Rough Terrain with Hexapod Walking Robot", he won the first place in the international IT SPY competition, which annually announces the best IT diploma theses.

Out of a record number of 164 teams from 77 different secondary schools, the robotic cart by R2-D2 team from Špitálská secondary school in Prague won at the autumn part of the 11th CTU Robo Competition. Teams Mindbreak and Mindfield from Příbram secondary school ranked second and third. The final round took place on Friday, 13 December in the Zenger Auditorium of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The event was organized by the Department of Control Engineering.

On 10 December, the best CTU athletes for 2019 were announced as part of the CTU Christmas Concert. They are Martina Satková, Anežka Paloudová, Jakub Zavřel, Jakub Dobrý and Tomáš Klinský. The Cups were handed over to the athletes by the CTU rector doc. Vojtěch Petráček, Director of the Institute of Physical Education and Sport doc. Jiří Drnek and doc. Zdeněk Valjent.

ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) announced the establishment of 17 so-called ELLIS units at the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver, Canada on 10 December. This branches aim to establish European researchers in machine-based fields learning top conditions comparable to the world's best workplaces. The Czech Institute of Computer Science, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) of CTU has become one of the ELLIS branches located in 10 European countries and Israel.

The Faculty of Biomedical Engineering of CTU inaugurated the Laboratory of Robotic Rehabilitation in its building in Kladno on Tuesday, 10 December. The laboratory will serve both for teaching future physiotherapists and for scientific purposes. This unique workplace has state-of-the-art robotic devices for restoring walking or hand grip functions, especially for patients with neurological or post-traumatic diagnoses.

The presentation „Photon counting detector package optimized for space debris optical tracking“ was announced as an Outstanding Student Presentation at the SPIE Optics + Optoelectronics 2019 international conference. Roberta Bimbová, first year master student at the Engineering Faculty of the Czech Technical University in Prague, Department of Physical Electronics also received annual membership in SPIE Student Membership or download up to 25 articles from SPIE Digital Library. The presentation was based on an article prepared by Robert together with prof. Ivan Procházka, Josef Blažej and Jan Kodet. The article was subsequently published in SPIE Proceedings.

On 4 December, the Space Oscars for the Galileo Masters and Copernicus Masters were awarded at the European Space Week in Helsinki, Finland. Dronetag, the Faculty of Information Technology startup,had won the regional competition, got into the TOP 10 of nearly 200 projects and also has won the main E-GNSS Accelerator Award.

Two footbridges with benches on Klínová cesta, construction in the form of a truss over the Bear Creek, a triangular footbridge at Hrnčířské Bo udy and a footbridge for cars and cars in Eliška's valley have been available to visitors of the highest Czech mountains since autumn. They were created thanks to the cooperation of the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague with the Krkonoše National Park Administration. A total of 30 students from 5 studios of the Institute of Design II participated in the project.

The awards of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports in Higher Education, Science and Research for 2019 know their winners. On 29 November, excellent students of bachelor's, master's and doctoral programs, top scientists and newly also university lecturers received the awards from Minister Robert Plaga and Deputy Minister for Universities, Science and Research Pavel Doleček. The František Běhounek Prize for the Promotion and Popularization of Czech Science and the Milada Paulová Prize for Scientists for Lifelong Contribution to Science were also presented at the ceremony in the Senate.

To show CTU students in Prague what it looks like at CERN, what experiments are going on there and what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can do - these were the main goals of the next year's Hands on CERN event held at the Faculty of Nuclear and Physical Engineering in October. Firstly, the participants listened to two lectures on particle physics. Robert Líčeník, a doctoral student of experimental nuclear and particle physics at the FNSPE, introduced the standard particle model and the basics of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory and also discussed current knowledge in this area. Principles of particle acceleration and detection were discussed in the second lecture by Karel Šafařík, who returned to the FNSPE after years spent at CERN, where he helped establish the ALICE experiment. A week later, on 18 October, students independently analyzed real data from the ATLAS experiment.