TEHRAN – Iranian students at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology won the 11th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2019) Special Mention Award, which was held in Madrid on November 26-29.

Organized by the Roboticslab at University Carlos III of Madrid, the event brought together researchers and practitioners working on the interaction between humans and intelligent robots and on the integration of robots into the society, according to ICSR website.
Elham Ranjkar, Raman Rafatnejad, Ali Amoozandeh Nobaveh, Ali Meghdari and Minoo Alemi won the award for inventing an Intelligent Elephant Social Robot called MAYA.

Social robot designs from practitioners are selected by the organizing committee and are invited for exhibition during the conference; those selected innovative designs will be granted awards in three categories of Innovation in software, applications and interaction modalities award, Innovation in hardware, design and interfaces award, Special Mention Award (the most important one).

MAYA also won the second place at the 7th International Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics, held on November 20-21 at Sharif University of Technology.

Social robots are intended to coexist with humans and engage in relationships that lead them to a better quality of life. The success of these relationships relies on a positive perception of the robots that can be achieved by their behavior through AI, computational models, or robot embodiments.

ICSR 2019 aimed to foster discussion on the development of innovative ideas, novel applications and relevant studies that contribute to the integration of social robots in our daily society.

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