By Guillem Vallicrosa
Photos: BTS organization
We attended the 10th International interdisciplinary field workshop of maritime robotics and applications – Breaking the Surface – BTS 2018. The conference was held on 30 Sep – 7 Oct, in Biograd na Moru, Croatia.
“BTS is a conference not only focused on marine robotics, but also in its applications like marine biology, marine geology, and underwater archaeology.
It was the second time I attended BTS, first time was back in 2014. Since it was the 10th year celebration we could find many pictures remembering all the different editions where we found ourselves and many people that we know from projects and other conferences. The conference is divided between mornings having different talks about the different topics, and the afternoon with workshops, hand-on, and demos of various robots and software.
Regarding our university, we had a tutorial from Nuno and Laszlo on Monday titled ‘Underwater optical image enhancement techniques‘ that had many people attending. On Tuesday we had a workshop to start to define ROS standards for underwater vehicles. More than 30 people from various universities attended and ended up in a very enriching discussion about problems and solutions we all faces developing software for underwater robots.
On Wednesday (together with IQUA robotics) there was a demo on how to work with the mission planning GUI, followed by a demo on the beach where Sparus II was commanded to do a small mission to gather and quickly plot it as a bathymetry.
We could not stay for the gala dinner and the field trip, but anyway we enjoyed the social programme of the other days where we had Norwegian party, Excellabust party (where we are partners and we brought some ‘fuet’, cookies, Catalan wines and ratafia), and the always funny Karaoke party.
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