Skoltech team wins ‘Best Demo Award’ at ACM Siggraph Asia 2019 Conference

A recent demonstration of the SwarmCloak technology, a novel system for landing a fleet of flying robots onto the human arm using light-sensitive landing pads, won the Best Demo Award at the ACM Siggraph Asia 2019 conference in Brisbane, Australia. SwarmCloak is the result of a collaboration between Skoltech and the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. The Siggraph Asia conference is an annual event that draws 14,000 participants and the top multinational companies such as Facebook, Google, Nvidia, who exhibit their new technologies.

Skoltech PhD student Evgeny Tsykunov, MSc-2 student Roman Ibrahimov, and MSc-2 student Juan Heredia, who are part of Professor Dzmitry Tsetserukou’s team at the Skoltech Space Center, conducted a demonstration of SwarmCloak at the conference. This alone is a great feat, as the demonstration takes place over the course of three days for nine hours per day; the demo must also be without malfunctions, and must be appealing to the attendees. Doing a demonstration is the most complicated way to present a technology but is more impactful and presenting before global companies like

Facebook as well as leading universities, not to mention winning the Best Demo Award, is an honor for Skoltech!

The “Emerging Technologies” section of ACM Siggraph Asia has a 20% acceptance rate, and 27 of the world’s most innovative technologies were on show. This was the first time that Russia took part in Siggraph Asia and the award is Russia’s greatest achievement thus far in the fields of robotics, haptics and VR.

“I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Hiroyuki Kajimoto of UEC, Japan, a world-leading scientist in the field of haptics who allowed us to apply the HaLUX technology developed by his laboratory. The exchange student, Mr. Taha Moriyama, was supported by UEC and conducted wonderful research at Skoltech last summer, which brought this paper to acceptance. Professor Kajimoto is hosting two Skoltech students a year and, to my knowledge, this is the most successful collaboration between Skoltech and a Japanese University. This joint award-winning paper is the result of Skoltech and UEC working together.” – Associate Professor Dzmitry Tsetserukou (Skoltech Space Center)

###

https:/

/

www.

youtube.

com/

watch?v=

2a4XrG_u3RE