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 effort made by Georges Giralt (LAAS) to set up and maintain a European community in robotics.

To be eligible for the award, the thesis must not only be of high quality but also have been defended during the calendar year prior to the 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. In addition to the thesis a CV and a list of publications related to the work have to be submitted, together with a letter of recommendation from the advisor. An panel of senior EURON researchers then evaluates the full package and selects a winner. Major emphasis is placed on a good evaluation of the impact of the research results.

The submission period is September each year, for theses dated the previous year. We received 17 submissions for the 2010 competition:

• Ana Cris Murillo-Arnal, Visual Localization for Robotics: metric, topological and higher abstraction levels
• Christian Plagemann, Gaussian Processes for Flexible Robot Learning
• Christian Cipriani, Control developments for prosthetic and cybernetic hands
• Ravinder Dahiya, Touch Sensor for Active Exploration and Visuo-Haptic Integration
• Ruben Martinez-Cantin, Active Map Learning for Robots: Insights into Statistical Consistency
• Angelika Peer, Design and Control of Admittance-Type Telemanipulation Systems
• Heiko Hamann, Space-Time Continuous Models of Swarm Robotic Systems: Supporting Global-to-Local Programming
• Davide Scaramuzza, Omnidirectional vision: from calibration to robot motion estimation
• Ludovic Righetti, Control of Legged Locomotion using Dynamical Systems: Design Methods and Adaptive Frequency Oscillators
• Gonzalo Lopez-Nicolas, Visual Control of Mobile Robots Through Multiple View Geometry
• Geraldo Silveira, Contributions to direct methods of estimation and control from visual data
• David Ribas, Underwater SLAM for Structured Environments Using an Imaging Sonar
• Emrah Akin Sisbot, Towards Human-Aware Robot Motions
• Lina Maria Paz, Divide and Conquer: EKF SLAM in O(n)
• Raquel Ros Espinoza, Action Selection in Cooperative Robot Soccer using Case-Based Reasoning
• Eris Chinellato, Visual neuroscience of robotic grasping
• Carlos Pérez Vidal, Control of robot manipulators using visual information: Application to the object's motion stimation

Eight PhD Award (awarded on April 7, 2009)

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:

Eduardo Rocón of the Instituto de Automática Industrial, Spain; for his thesis "Active reduction of pathological tremor of superior limbs by means of robotic exoskeletons.

Congratulations also to the two runners-up:

Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands: "Approximate planning under uncertainty in partially observable environments"; and
Vincent Duindam, The Netherlands: "Port-Based modeling and control for efficient bipedal walking".

CONGRATULATIONS!
to the Core Robotics winner:

Cyrill Stachniss of the University of Freiburg, Germany; for his thesis "Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots.

Congratulations also to the two runners-up:

Andreas Nuechter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn, Germany: "Semantic three dimensional maps for autonomous mobile robots"; and
Samir Bouabdallah, EPFL, Switzerland: "Design and control of quadrotors with application to autonomous flying".

Previous award winners.

We hope that you will get involved in many of EURON's activities and encourage others to do so as well.

Attending meetings is an excellent way of making contacts and friends within the community. These contacts are normally interesting, and may also be useful!

EURON Schools are aimed at PhD students so are particularly good for people wishing to deepen an already existing interest. [ More details  ... ]

Your knowledge and resources are valuable — please consider sharing them with others by adding items to the databases, contributing your opinions to the roadmap and benchmarking initiatives, and your information to this website.

Especially, please contribute to the Video Collection for Students asap.

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Make use of the resources that EURON offers. Much of the information is freely available to all, but for other resources you have to be a EURON member. Apply for the grants, use the databases and the contacts, apply for the awards, use the mailing lists.