An international jury consisting of scientific personalities such as Professor Wolfgang Wahlster, a world-renowned German researcher, awarded three young talents with the RYIA Industry 4.0 Award. First place went to Varun Burde, who works in the RICAIP Testbed for Industry 4.0 at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) CTU. Here he works on the robotic manipulation of objects using computer vision methods and is also a doctoral student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University.
The RYIA competition – RICAIP Young Investigator Award – was announced by the Czech-German research center RICAIP for the first time this year. Other awardees are Michal Skalský from CEITEC VUT and Caspar Jacob from the German Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI. The prize is associated with an interesting financial reward, which this year was sponsored by the Technical University in Brno. The award was personally handed over to the winners by BUT Rector Ladislav Janíček on the occasion of the ceremonial opening of the Testbeb at CEITEC BUT in Brno, as well as the main organizer of this year’s first year of the competition within RICAIP.
„The six-member international commission had a difficult task, because all the nominees and the awardees have very good results considering their age,“ explains Tilman Becker, director of the RICAIP center, who chaired the expert commission. „We assessed not only scientific results, but also experiments carried out so far in the field of Industry 4.0, which have the potential to be used in practice or excel in a combination of methods and approaches. It was for this reason that the choice finally fell on Varun Burde.”
Varun Burde, a doctoral student at CTU, originally from India, is mainly involved in robotics with the manipulation of objects using computer vision. It uses the most modern artificial intelligence methods in combination with Industry 4.0 standards. These are so-called „pick-and-place“ applications, which are used in a number of industries and are mainly important for increasing the level of automation and autonomy of production and assembly. At CIIRC CTU wants to focus on difficult objects in further research, such as objects made of transparent materials or those with complex geometry.
„This award is an honor for me and at the same time a great motivation for further research,“ says Varun Burde. „I’ve been fascinated by robotics for years, it’s great to see how a computer program can bring life to sensors and result in a robust solution for industry. I think that the variations of robotics and its possibilities have infinite dimensions, and I will be happy to discover them with the help of my trainers.“
The trainers of this young researcher are two at CIIRC CTU – Pavel Burget, director of the RICAIP Testbed for Industry 4.0, and Torsten Sattler, a top researcher in the field of 3D computer vision, holder of the so-called RICAIP Tenure Track position and now a recent holder of the prestigious GAČR EXPRO grant.
„Pavel Burget and I were looking for a PhD student who we would supervise together and who would be able to connect robotics with computer vision,“ explains Torsten Sattler. „I am happy that Varun has accepted our offer and we can work with him on new challenges.“
„Varun’s research finds solutions for various basic tasks, such as 3D reconstruction, estimating the position of an object or finding the right grip points. It perfectly combines advanced robotics and artificial intelligence and creates solutions that can benefit not only industries, but also find use in agriculture or biomedicine, for example,“ summarizes Pavel Burget.
The Czech-German Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production RICAIP connects industrial testbeds at universities in Prague, Brno and Saarbrücken, Germany. As one of the most important priorities, it has the support of young talents in the initial stages of their scientific careers. The goal of the RYIA award is to support and reward young researchers under the age of 35 who are advocating for a contribution in the field of Industry 4.0. Candidates who develop, for example, solutions in the areas of industrial digitization, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, computer vision, the Internet of Things or industrial software could be nominated for the competition. The main parameter was collaboration on industry-led research related to RICAIP’s scientific objectives.
