First UCD Robotics Open Day a Smashing Success!

On the 9th of February the first UCD Robotics Open Day took place in the School of Computer Science & Informatics in UCD. Hosted by UCD Robotics Group, the day featured demonstrations of robots big and small, with highlights including the Nao, a 2 feet tall humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics, which impressed attendees with his Tai Chi and Irish language skills, as well as a fully autonomous sailing boat, developed by Brian Mulkeen from UCD's School of Engineering. Visitors also quickly made friends with a TurtleBot, a small robot based on the iRobot Create platform, which happily followed people around the room as long as it could keep them in sight.

After the demonstrations, robotics researchers from all over Ireland had been invited to present their work to a general audience. Dr. Bryan Gardiner introduced attendees to some of the avenues of research conducted at the University of Ulster, Magee, while Dr. John Kelleher, head of the DIT Applied Intelligence Group, presented DIT's research into robotic dialogue and spatial cognition systems. Howell Jordan of LERO Irish Software Engineering Research Centre in Limerick talked about developing robot control software on computationally constrained platforms, while Conor McGinn gave an overview of the Trinity Robotics Club and how students in Ireland could get involved in robotics. The sessions also featured talks by two UCD robotics researchers. Dr. Mauro Dragone presented RUBICON, a recently funded FP7 project coordinated by UCD, and Jennifer Treanor introduced the notion of generating robotic hardware drivers for rapid development of robot control software. The day finished with a tour of the UCD Robotics Laboratory.

See all photos of the event