Kick-off Project Meeting

The FrontSeat project (Fostering Opportunities Towards Slovak Excellence in Advanced Control for Smart Industries), which received support under the Horizon Europe program, has completed its Kick-off Project Meeting. It is an important milestone within the project, in which STU acts as a coordinator.

The FrontSeat project is aimed at increasing the research and academic prospects of Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia (STUBA) and at initiating the evolution of STUBA into a modern, reputed excellent institution that performs high-quality research in advanced automatic control, educates top-quality scholars and industrial practitioners, and is successful in active dissemination and exploitation of its research and innovation efforts. For this purpose, STUBA teams up with two renowned research groups in automatic control from RU Bochum, Germany (RUB) and Pisa University, Italy (UNIPI).

An important project milestone was the “Kick-off Project Meeting”, which STU hosted on October 27 and 28, 2022 in Bratislava. Its participants were from STUBA: Miroslav Fikar, Radoslav Paulen, Juraj Oravec, Michal Tölgyessy, Danica Rosinová, Martin Gulan, Oliver Moravčík, Viltaré Platzner, Peter Cuninka, Alžbeta Lapšanská and Martin Grančay, from UNIPI: Gabriele Pannocchia, Francesca Ceron and Michele Padrone and from RUB: Martin Mönnigmann, Raphael Dyrska and Christiane Wüllner.

On Thursday, October 27, they first visited the Institute of Information Engineering, Automation and Mathematics of FCHPT STU, then at FEI STU the Institute of Automotive Mechatronics and the Institute of Robotics and Cybernetics, as well as the Institute of Automation, Measurement and Applied Informatics at SjF STU. The plenary part was opened by round table presentations, after which the FronSeat project was presented by its responsible researcher, prof. Miroslav Fikar. After the subsequent presentations of the partners, the program included the presentation of work packages WP1-WP4 (Capacity building in research management, Support for excellence in automatic control research, Support for visibility through strategic networking, Initiation of a new doctoral program) and the tasks resulting from them, as well as the joint development of a detailed plan of activities.

On Friday 28 October there was a presentation of WP5 (Project management and DEC activities) – project management structure, quality processes, risk management, financial issues, dissemination and communication activities of use, visual identity of the project, open science, gender and DNSH and the General Assembly under the leadership project leaders of all three partners.

The specific objectives of the FrontSeat project are: to strengthen cooperation with two research groups from Western Europe, to intensify research in the field of advanced automatic driving, to open new cooperation channels through academic and industrial networks, to train excellent young/senior researchers and project managers, and to effectively disseminate and use research results STUBA.

The responsible researcher of the project is prof. Ing. Miroslav Fikar, PhD. (UIAM FCHPT STU), which joined forces with other institutes in the field of Cybernetics at STU (Prof. Ing. František Duchoň, PhD. (URK FEI STU), Prof. Ing. Danica Rosinová, PhD. (UAMT FEI STU), Assoc. Ing. Martin Gulan, PhD. (UAMAI SjF STU), Assoc. Ing. Maximilián Strémy, PhD. (UVPT MTF STU)), submitted the project and succeeded in tough international competition.

The unique features of the project are:

• Adoption/amendment of internal research project-related rules and procedures and develop project management toolbox,
• Research efforts aiming at the continued creation of high-quality research results and software tools,
• Establishment of a series of guest scientific and academic lectures,
• Exchanges and training of project managers and research (junior and senior) personnel,
• Organisation of conferences and invited sessions, seminars with industry, and annual summer schools,
• Preparation and implementation of a new PhD curriculum at STUBA,
• Establishment of an academic-industrial research and innovation cluster.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon under grant no. 101079342 (Fostering Opportunities Towards Slovak Excellence in Advanced Control for Smart Industries).

Text: J. Rybanský, foto: J. Rybanský, V. Platzner, source: STUBA (in Slovak).