University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing – WATCHPLANT Partner

University of Zagreb Faculty
of Electrical Engineering and Computing

University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing is the largest technical faculty and leading educational and R&D institution in the fields of electrical engineering, information and communication technology and computing in the Republic of Croatia. Being a constituent of the University of Zagreb, FER has its roots in the Technical Faculty, founded in 1919. In 1956, the departments of Technical Faculty grew into four new faculties, Faculty of Electrical Engineering being one of them. The Faculty offers today substantial educational and R&D facilities including 35 lecture halls, more than 60 laboratories, Congress centre, tele-conference centre, central library and 12 department libraries, student restaurant, sport and recreation facilities on 43308 m2. The Faculty is organised in 12 departments which represent the focal points of education, research and development in various fields. The present research and educational staff comprises more than 160 professors and 210 teaching and research assistants and around 3800 students at the undergraduate and graduate level and 450 PhD students. All those numbers clearly emphasize highly spirited activities in teaching and research.

The Faculty has developed valuable international cooperation with many research institutions around the world, either directly or through inter-university cooperation. Researchers of the Faculty are currently participating in 33 Structural fund (ERDF) projects, 12 multilateral COST actions, 9 bilateral projects, 19 HORIZON 2020 projects, 2 INTERREG, 2 European Social Fund (ESF) projects, 6 ERASMUS+ projects and 54 Croatian Science Foundation projects, and they are as well as the leaders of a number of industrial projects. The number of international projects in the last two years makes the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing one of the most internationally active institutions in Croatia. Laboratories involved in this project are LARICS and LABUST.

In the last 20 years the LARICS (http://larics.fer.hr) – Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems research group has been involved in research on integrated robotics and process control. LARICS researchers (4 professors, 3 post-docs and 14 PhD students) have mainly participated in research devoted to the unmanned aerial systems, intelligent control systems, service robotics, control of multi-agent systems, robot formations, planning, scheduling and decision making in autonomous systems and application of new technologies in industrial control systems. LARICS is equipped with state of the art electronics design software, aerial robotics systems, humanoid and bio-inspired robots, ground mobile platforms, sets of various sensors, actuators and signal processing boards. Particular emphasis has been given to collaboration with industry, which resulted in many successful implementations of novel control algorithms and human-machine-interfaces in industrial plants. LARICS researchers were involved in 8 H2020 projects, 4 ongoing (AeroTwin – coordinator, AeroWind, Aerial-Core, Encore) and 4 successfully finished ones (subCULTron, RoboCom++, ENDORSE, ACROSS-CoE). LARICS researchers were involved in 4 EU FP7 projects, which successfully finished (EuRoC, ASSISI_bf, ACROSS, EC-SAFEMOBIL). In 2020 LARICS participated in the MBZIRC robotic challenge, achieving notable results. Within EuRoC project, LARICS participated in Challenge 3 showcasing an autonomous visual inspection of a mockup wind generator using UAVs, which enabled inspection experts to tele‐operate them as an aid to their mission, while focusing on the inspection task at hand. Recently LARICS performed a semi-autonomous visual inspection of a WTG at Pometeno brdo windfarm in Croatia. LARICS participates in several national projects financed by the government and industrial partners, and 2 collaborative projects with scientists from USA and PR China.