The JUNIOR STAR grants are intended for excellent early career scientists up to 8 years after obtaining their Ph.D. who have already published in prestigious international journals and have significant international experience. Thanks to the five-year project with the possibility to draw up to 25 million CZK, they will have the opportunity to become scientifically independent and possibly start their own research group, which can bring new research topics to Czech science. The Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GA ČR) will support 19 JUNIOR STAR projects from next year.
There will be seven winners of this prestigious award at the CTU Faculty of Electrical Engineering. In 2020, they were awarded to Assoc. Miloslav Čapek from the Department of Electromagnetic Fields and Dr. Giorgios Tolias, and a year later Dr. Zuzana Kúkelová (both from the Visual Recognition Group of the Department of Cybernetics). In 2022, Dr. Robert Pennicka, an expert in rescue drones, and Dr. Jakub Cikhardt from the Department of Physics, a specialist in plasma research, were awarded. Last year, the grant was awarded to Dr. Lukas Neumann of the Department of Cybernetics' Visual Recognition Group.
Tomáš Báča's basic research project will focus on the future of navigation of mobile robots and their ability to perceive their environment. "The project gives us an amazing opportunity to explore a traditional problem in robotics - automatic mapping - in a very unconventional way. We have decided to put aside the existing dogma in mapping, i.e. the need for precise knowledge of the robot's position, and to start anew with completely different approaches that will mimic the ways in which living organisms map, plan and share plans," said Dr. Tomas Baca, who works in the Multi-robots Systems Group, explaining his research goals.
One of his tasks will be to solve the problem of extracting multi-modal features from sensory data. "By this we can imagine the ability to repeatedly identify an object in the environment using data from any subset of different sensors, e.g. a colour camera, LiDAR, RADAR or thermal camera," explains Tomáš Báča, who thanks to the grant will have the opportunity to build a team of 3 PhD students and 2 other postdocs with whom he will conduct research over a period of five years.
"The EXPRO and JUNIOR STAR competitions are among the flagship competitions of the GA Czech Republic. It is very difficult to succeed in them, but if a scientist succeeds, he or she will get a unique opportunity to implement his or her ideas and, in the case of budding researchers, to become scientifically independent. They will have five years to solve the project and in the case of JUNIOR STAR up to 25 million crowns, in the case of EXPRO the amount is double," says the President of the GA of the Czech Republic, Prof. Petr Baldrian.
For more information about the JUNIOR STAR grants from the GA CR, please visit the link https://gacr.cz/expro-a-junior-star-nove-excelentni-projekty/
