INESC TEC’s article on Robotics won the Best Master Thesis Award

Fábio Azevedo was the winner of the Portuguese Robotics Society Award for the Best National Master Thesis in Robotics completed in 2018, under the theme "Real-Time LiDAR-based Power Lines Detection for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" within the work developed at INESC TEC's Centre for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CRAS) and the School of Engineering of Porto (ISEP). This award was achieved ex-aequo with João Miguel Cartucho from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) with the article “Robust Object Recognition Through Symbiotic Deep Learning In Mobile Robots”. In total, eight applications were submitted.

The article addressed the development of a real-time data processing framework derived from a LiDAR, aiming at autonomously detecting medium and high voltage lines. The developed solution is integrated into the drone for inspecting INESC TEC's electrical assets of as a security system during the autonomous inspection process.

This award was delivered during the ICARSC 2019's - International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions 2019 - conference dinner, which was held between 24 and 26 April at the Gondomar Multipurpose Pavilion. It’s an annual event held in Portugal, in which national and international researchers in the Robotics area are given the opportunity to present the results of their most recent researches.

INESC TEC’s researchers responsible for the organisation of the Portuguese Robotics Open and ICARSC 2019 were António Paulo Moreira, Cláudia Rocha, Manuel Silva, José Lima and Pedro Costa, Coordinator and researchers of INESC TEC's Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIIS), respectively.

The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC, UP-FEUP, P.Porto-ISEP and IPB.