Georges Giralt PhD Award

for the best PhD thesis in Europe

The Georges Giralt PhD Award is an annual award given by EURON for the best PhD thesis in Europe. The aim is to encourage high-quality work amongst young researchers in their first research period. The prize consists of a diploma and, in addition, the authors of all short-listed theses are offered an opportunity to publish their thesis as a monograph with Springer.
The PhD award is named the Georges Giralt PhD Award in recognition of the significant efforts made by Georges Giralt (LAAS) to set up and stimulate a European community in robotics during multiple decennia and starting from the 1970s.

To be eligible for the award, the thesis must not only be of high quality but also have been defended during the period mentioned in the yearly Call. Students who have been awarded a PhD degree within that time period can submit their thesis for consideration, if the PhD granting institute is a member of EURON. A panel of senior EURON researchers reviews the submissions and selects a winner. The Award is presented during the yearly European Robotics Forum

More details

The Call for the 2012 Georges Giralt PhD Award is now open! Submission deadline is 31st December, 2011.

All PhD theses defended between December 2010 and December 2011 (included) at one of the EURON member institutes are eligible for this Award. Candidates send a PDF copy of their thesis to the EURON Board, by email via board AT lists.euron.org. (Please, also provide a link where your thesis can be downloaded, so that we can provide a web page with all candidates, for maximal dissemination within the community.) Candidates can submit their thesis only once in their carreer.

We welcome theses with strong theoretical contributions, but certainly also with a focus on professional applications, or with a high degree of multi-disciplinarity showing how robotics technologies can be 'exported' to new domains.

The reward will be given to the winner(s) at the occasion of the European Robotics Forum, in Odense, Denmark. The selection of the finalists will be announced mid-February 2012, and these finalists are expected to give a 20 minutes presentation of their research at the Forum, since part of the Award evaluation will be done on the basis of that oral presentation.

The jury of this event consists of the following members: Sarthak Misra, Geert De Cubber, Fabio Bonsignorio, Krzysztof Kozlowski, Paolo Rocco, Erwin Prassler, Catalin Buiu, Giuseppina Gini, Jose A. Castellanos, Daniele Nardi, Alessandro Saffiotti, Aydan Erkmen, Jorge Dias, Angel P. del Pobil, Gerhard Kraetzschmar, Herman Bruyninckx.

The Call closed on December 31, 2010, and we received 31 submissions. The first three in the list below have been selected by the European Education and Training Board as the finalists, and they presented their work on the European Robotics Forum. The winner was Mario Prats. Congratulations to all finalists!

Mario Prats	Robot Physical Interaction through the combination of Vision, Tactile and Force Feedback. Applications to Assistive Robotics
Radu Bogdan Rusu	Semantic 3D Object Maps for Everyday Manipulation in Human Living Environments
Michaël Van Damme	Towards Safe Control of a Compliant Manipulator Powered by Pneumatic Muscles
Cyril Joly	Contributions aux méthodes de localisation et cartographie simultanées par vision omnidirectionnelle
Brahim Tamadazte	Vision 3D et Commande par asservissements visuels pour la micromanipulation et le micro-assemblage de MEMS. Application à l’automatisation d’une station de micro-assemblage
Gonçalo de Freitas Santos Neto	Planning, Learning and Control Under Uncertainty Based on Discrete Event Systems and Reinforcement Learning
Jody A. Saglia	Development of a high performance ankle rehabilitation robot
Ruben Smits	Robot Skills: Design of a constraint-based methodology and software support
Luciano Spinello	Scene understanding for mobile robots
Germano Manuel Correia dos Santos Veiga	On the orchestration of operations in flexible manufacturing
Jan Faigl	Multi-goal path planning for cooperative sensing
Thomas Thüer	Mobility evaluation of wheeled all-terrain robots. Metrics and application
Gian Diego Tipaldi	Looking Inside for Mapping the Outside: Introspective Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Antonio Franchi	Decentralized Methods for Cooperative Task Execution inMulti-robot Systems
Martin Friedmann	Simulation of Autonomous Robot Teams with Adaptable Levels of Abstraction
Nicola Greggio	Unsupervised Object Segmentation, Representation, and Tracking for Humanoid Robots
Micha Hersch	Adaptive Sensorimotor Peripersonal Space Representation and Motor Learning for a Humanoid Robot
Antidio Viguria Jiménez	Market-based distributed task allocation methodologies applied to multi-robot exploration
Jesús Iván Maza Alcañiz	Distributed Architecture for the Cooperation of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Civil Applications
Liang Ju	A Novel Amphibian Locomotion for Autonomous Surface Vehicle in Environment Monitoring Application
Uwe Mettin	Principles for Planning and Analyzing Motions of Underactuated Mechanical Systems and Redundant Manipulators
Rogério de Almeida Richa	Robust 3D Motion Tracking for Robotic-Assisted Beating Heart Surgery
Adriano Fagiolini	Boolean Consensus and Intrusion Detection for Secure Distributed Robotics
Pedro Tiago Martins Batista	Sensor-based Navigation and Control of Autonomous Vehicles
Hugo Filipe Costelha de Castro	Robotic Tasks Modelling and Analysis Based on Discrete Event Systems
Javier Civera	Real-Time EKF-Based Structure from Motion
Tinne De Laet	Rigorously Bayesian Multitarget Tracking and Localization
Manuel Béjar Domínguez	Methodology and Techniques for designing control systems of autonomous helicopters
Nevio Dubbini	Left invertibility of I/O quantized systems IFS, number theory, cryptography, algorithms
Jose Luis Blanco Claraco	Contributions to Localization, Mapping and Navigation in Mobile Robotics
Lazaros Nalpantidis	Study and Implementation of Stereo Vision Systems for Robotic Applications

The 2010 Georges Giralt PhD Award was won by Ludovic Righetti from EPFL, with a thesis entitled Control of Legged Locomotion using Dynamical Systems: Design Methods and Adaptive Frequency Oscillators.
The other finalists were Eris Chinellato, Angelika Peer, Christian Plagemann, and Davide Scaramuzza.

The three finalists that presented their PhD on the
Annual Meeting in Leuven are:

And the winner was... Alejandro-Dizan Vasquez-Govea!

Two prizes were awarded in 2008, one for a Core Robotics thesis and one for a more applied, Technology Transfer, thesis.
CONGRATULATIONS!
to the Technology Transfer winner: ^

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