UL FE students achieve success at the international EUROPE EMBODIED robotics hackathon in Munich

Matija Pilko and Klemen Semelbauer, students of the Master’s programme in Robotics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, together with the third member of their team, Jose Ospina from Spain, achieved outstanding success at the international 48-hour EUROPE EMBODIED hackathon in Munich. The team won 1st place in Wendy’s Autonomous Quadruped Inspection Challenge and 3rd place overall in the hackathon.

The hackathon took place as part of the EUROPE EMBODIED robotics week in Munich, organised by RoboTUM, START Munich, TUM International GmbH and ESRA – European Student Robotics Association, with the support of partners and sponsors including Ignite Next, Wendy, Intel, TUM MIRMI, Anthropic and others. Out of more than 350 applicants, approximately 25 teams were selected to participate in three technical challenges involving drones, robotic manipulators, and autonomous inspection using a quadruped robot.

Matija, Klemen and Jose entered the Autonomous Quadruped Inspection challenge, using the Unitree Go2 EDU robotic platform and the WendyOS development environment. In 48 hours, they developed ARVIT, an agentic robotic system for the autonomous inspection of industrial environments. The solution is designed as a robotic companion for operators, extending and improving their capabilities when monitoring, exploring and inspecting industrial facilities.

ARVIT functions as an autonomous robotic inspector or operator companion. The system responds to the operator’s voice commands and gestures and supports two main modes of operation: as an assistant, in which the robot follows the operator and helps with exploring the environment, or as a monitoring system, in which it independently monitors the industrial environment. The solution combines computer vision, robot control, autonomous navigation using a LiDAR sensor and SLAM technology, anomaly detection, system integration, and simulation using tools such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim. The system is further enhanced by AI agents that allow the robot’s behaviour to adapt to changes in the environment and to the operator’s requirements while carrying out a task.

At the end of the 48-hour development period, the teams presented their solutions to Wendy developers, who selected the ARVIT project as the best solution in the Autonomous Quadruped Inspection Challenge category. The winning teams from each category then presented their projects on the main stage of the closing EUROPE EMBODIED Summit event in central Munich, where they were evaluated by an expert jury. Team ARVIT achieved 3rd place in the overall ranking across all three challenges.

The achievement is an important recognition of the knowledge, creativity and technical expertise of students from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, while also confirming their successful work in the fields of robotics, autonomous systems, computer vision and the development of solutions for real-world industrial environments.