A medical platform based on artificial intelligence, an application to overcome aerophobia, an interactive fitting room, an online study service: this is only a fraction of the projects that the jury members of the major startup contest for Russia and Eastern Europe, GoTech, considered promising and which may one day become a global success story.
During the event, four industry pitch sessions were organized: Digital Health for projects in the field of medicine (partners Medme, Teltech Capital); FunTech for projects in the field of entertainment (partner FunCubator); VC Pitch for projects in the field of machine learning, big data, virtual and augmented reality and the Internet of things; Robotics & AI for projects involving robots and artificial intelligence. In addition, winners were selected by GoTech and partners including Beeline, Google "Kaspersky Lab", Dell, EMC, Gazprom Neft, Raiffeisenbank and other respected companies.
At the pitch sessions, visitors could watch the new teams that have emerged in the past year give their presentations, as well as hear from companies whose technologies and solutions have already been proven in the market. Of the 725 projects that participated, 22 companies were successful, two of them from ITMO.
Robotics & AI Category
Postgraduate students from the Faculty of Control Systems and Robotics, Ivan Borisov, Oleg Borisov and Vladislav Gromov, under the guidance of Sergey Kolubin, head of the Department of Mechatronics, presented their project “Universal industrial device for gripping, and securely holding and guiding objects of different shapes”. With this project they won the Robotics and AI pitch session. There were altogether 80 applications in this particular track, and 11 teams ended up in the finals. Some of the teams were representing such companies as Skoltech, “Gyrolab”, Marvelmind Robotics and others.
The team solves the problem of gripping, holding and positioning pieces by robotic systems for application in automated production. In most cases, a gripping device is used for industrial purposes, designed specifically for manipulating objects of a strictly defined shape and specific sizes. It is suitable for hard automation of high volume production, but is unsuitable for development of industrial cyber-physical systems for “smart” small-scale production.
The uHVAT (Universal Hand with Vision, Adaptation and Transformability) project is dedicated to the development of universal industrial devices that capture, secure and orient small objects of different shapes, sizes and mass. The device has the advantage of both a regular pincer-type gripping device and a high-tech anthropomorphic gripper devices: simplicity of design and reliability of the former and functionality of the latter. The project aims to combine the best of what is out there into one device, with a smart design and smart software and, thanks to this synergy, to get an element of industrial cyber-physical systems.
As a prize, the team received the opportunity to launch a pilot project together with TRA Robotics and present GoTech with them at the TechCrunch Disrupt forum in Berlin. The mission of the company TRA Robotics is the creation of flexible production which accepts and executes any new design or product configuration in real time without the need to modify the layout of the production process.
Next Generation Security Category
The project “Drone Employee” from Kaspersky Lab were the winners in this category. The project manages a shared fleet of drones, which is based on Aira (Autonomous Intelligent Robot Agent) technological solutions. The winning team is made up of Alexander Kapitonov (Assistant at the Department of Control Systems and Informatics) and Sergey Lonshakov (Blockchain developer). At the core of the project is the use of the Ethereum platform and smart contracts. The devices will be able to create contracts between themselves for the transportation of goods, formation of flight routes, coordinate their flight with the actions of other drones. Read more about the project in our article.
The award for the project was a free trip to the Web Summit in Lisbon.
The full list of finalists can be found here.
