In “Skolkovo” have been summarized the contest results of robotics projects

In February, 2013 within the conference “Skolkovo Robotics” robotics has been recognized one of priority directions of investigations and technical development. Among backgrounds of the expected fast growth of this branch is increase of labor productivity in terms of constant competitiveness growth on international market, improvement of life quality in developed countries, and, as a result, population ageing, and also need in people replacement, working in emergency conditions – life-savers, military.

According to experts, robotics is in the start of its explosive growth. During the near ten years the market of this sphere will rapidly increase and can comprise several trillion dollars. And for this reason it is very important to stimulate technological entrepreneurship in this sphere.

Investigations in the sphere of robotics concern all clusters of the Fund – from biology and medicine, space and telecommunications to nuclear, information and energy-efficient technologies. According to the contest terms, all the projects should have included the prototype of robotics autonomous system and a set of technical documentation.

In the contest seven projects have taken part. The projects have been estimated by nine experts in the sphere of robotics, business and information technologies, among which are representatives of the contest organizers (the Ministry of communications and mass media of the Russian Federation, the Fund by Oleg Deripaska “Volnoe Delo”, the Skolkovo Science and Technologies Institute, “VisionLabs”, LLC, the corporate venture Fund “LETA Capital”), Chiefs of the Fund’s Clusters (Information, Space and Nuclear technologies).

Among the estimation criteria there are such aspects, as consumers’ features of the product and its innovativeness, opportunity of achieving claimed indexes, perspectives of the project commercialization.

The company “X-Turion” became the winner of the contest. The presented project is focused on creation of the adaptive navigation system, planning of movements and remote control for mobile service robots. According to the presented concept, this system gives mind to robots and is a step forward from manual operation, usually used nowadays in systems of telepresence, or primitive algorithms of robots-vacuum cleaners movements and automatic grass-mower. Its implementation in the project received modern technologies and original methods, which include compensation of parameter uncertainty and external disturbance, remote control, visual plotting and navigation. A special attention has been paid to consumer characteristics of the end product.

Funds of received grant the company plans to spend on additional work of a prototype till production model.

According to the Chairman of the contest committee, executive director of the IT-cluster Igor Bogachyov, “X-Turion” has won in the fair competition with strong competitors. The main positive factor of this work is the optimal balance between innovativeness, potential of technologies commercialization and teams’ competences”.