By Kalwinder Kaur
The word 'robot' was first introduced in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Capek, through his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).
Czech Technical University (CTU) serves to be the centerpiece for robotic research. Here, researchers are carrying out the NIFTI project that includes understanding the interaction of robots with humans, based on which a cognitive humanoid robot can be developed. These human-robot teams can be deployed for evaluating disaster situation and for identification of victims, and other hazardous tasks that are otherwise unsafe for humans.
In Humavips, robots with auditory and visual capabilities that can discover a new environment, recognize and interact with individuals based on multimodal perception are being developed by researchers.
A research team from CTU and other researchers from Czech Institute of Microelectronic Application, in association with a sister project, Symbrion developed a five-year long project called Replicator that involves development of 'swarm bots', which are hoards of tiny bio-inspired autonomous robots that can modify themselves for achieving varied tasks.
Masaryk University researchers discovered the cause of déjà vu. In association with Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) scientists, the team found specific brain structures responsible for sensing déjà vu, while other individuals may never sense it.
The research team at CTU's Brno campus is making efforts on the M-ECO project that involves creating an advanced epidemic intelligence and medical data system based on web 2.0 technologies such as 'open access' media and user-generated content as unofficial to examine diseases and alert about epidemics.
The Reflect project involves superior design approaches for FPGAs (Field-programmable gate-arrays). The integrated circuit can be configured and reconfigured after fabrication - in multi-core embedded computing for different applications.
With other researchers, the scientists at Charles University in Prague are designing high-volume machine translation systems that respond intelligently and speedily to user feedback.
The Faust project involves direct user feedback-based study of five pairs of EU official languages to reduce the errors and mistranslation issues in machine translation systems.
CTU team is working on the Maseltov initiative, which involves the implementation of innovative mobile ICT technologies to enable European immigrants to overcome, language, social and cultural barriers with services like social networking, ubiquitous language translation, and access to administrative and emergency health information, navigation, and persuasive learning tools.
Source: http://cordis.europa.eu/