This international conference, sponsored by the Portuguese Robotics Society (SPR - Sociedade Portuguesa de Robótica), the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society and the IEEE Portugal Section – Portuguese Chapter, was supported by INESC TEC’s Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CROB)*, through the coordinator António Paulo Moreira, who was part of the organising committee.

Various other CROB researchers participated in sessions on “Computer Vision / Modelling” and “Human-Robot Interaction,” and presented papers – almost one hundred papers submitted, from 11 different countries. The invited speaker was Marco Dorigo, who did a presentation titled “The Swarm-bots and Swarmanoid Experiments in Swarm Robotics.”

The papers selected to be presented will be included in the IEEE Xplore and some of them will be published in a broader version of Springer’s international Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems.

Simultaneously to the lectures, there were competitions between robots and demonstrations. The event welcomed over 500 participants and it was the most international edition of the festival – over 50 foreign competitors from Germany, The Netherlands, Iran, France, Spain, Lithuania, Austria, Brazil and Turkey. Manuel Silva, researcher at CROB, was also member of the organising committee of the National Robotics Festival.

The goal with this festival is to promote science and technology. It is promoted annually since 2001 in different cities.

*former Robotics and Intelligent Systems Unit (ROBIS)

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: FEUP and IPP.

Photo credits: Festival Nacional de Robótica