As part of its capacity building activities, the DeCAIR project carried out a 2-week program in Pisa, Italy from 19 to 30 June 2023. This program was organized by the University of Pisa and hosted in its School of Engineering. The participants included 18 faculty members and 10 students from the University of Jordan, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Tafila Technical University, Lebanese University, Beirut Arab University, and University of Stuttgart.
In the first week, all participants joined the Advanced Course in Robotics that included three basic topics, two advanced topics, two seminars, and two lab visits. In the second week, the student participants participated in technical and cultural visits to labs, startups, and cultural attractions in Pisa region.
On 25 June 2023, the students visited the following University of Pisa labs in Navacchio:
1. Additive Manufacturing Lab: This lab aims to develop materials for innovative products by modelling the device material (such as sensors) and fabricating it using 2D and/or 3D printers. They showed some application cases such as near-field sensor, for distance sensing used as breath rate sensor and 3D chip less RFID tag which is used as unique identification for objects or a class of objects.
2. Augmented Reality and Cloud Computing: They presented some projects related to AR such as TOLIFE project which aims to use AI to monitor human health and sleep quality by processing data captured by sensors. In Cloud computing part, two systems were presented and tested practically: the first uses computer vision techniques to capture labors and engineers who do not wear helmet or safety vest (using YOLO V5 tiny or V4 tiny), the other project is a monitoring system for AC condition quality in the building.
3. Advanced Manufacturing Lab: This lab contains several fixed manipulators and mobile robots.
On 29 June 2023, the students visited two companies and robotics lab:
1. Proxima Robotics: This company aims to develop software to control robots. They presented some project they are working on which is a cleaning machine. It was originally driven by a human, but they aim to make it work automatically. For now, they do not use AI in their applications.
2. QbRobotics: The company develops end effectors for robots. They presented some types of their products and how they work.
3. Labs of Centro E. Piaggio: It is part of the University of Pisa; this lab provides a flexible environment for graduate students to do their practical research. It contains fixed and mobiles robots. They print most of components using a 3D printer in the same lab. They present some hot research.