From 4 to 6 June Madrid hosted the 14th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space, i-SAIRAS 2018, a must for the world’s top experts and organizations working on these cutting-edge space applications.

The organization of this biennial event falls each time to different worldwide space agencies (CSA-ASC, DLR, JAXA, NASA or ESA), with the aim of sharing the venue around the continents. The turn this year came of ESA’s Automation and Robotics group, choosing Madrid as the venue to bring together representatives from the space robotics industry and from the main space agencies, like NASA, ESA, JAXA, the UK space agency, CNES and CDTI.

In this year’s forum, which has aired the latest ideas and developments, GMV has taken part not only as sponsor but also as speaker, giving various papers on the different developments and projects it is currently working on. These included the LUCID field-test campaign conducted in 2018 in Tenerife, the preliminary design and experimental study project of the High Mobility Sample Fetching Rover, the SPARTAN rover navigation system and the European Robotic Goal-Oriented autonomous controller (ERGO). ERGO aims to enhance the European Commission’s autonomy system (H2020 PERASPERA program) for planning, reprograming and forecasting the autonomous onboard execution of robotics systems in order to carry out all necessary basic activities to ensure the mission is performed according to pre-established high-level goals.

Furthermore, with the support of Spain’s Industry Technology Development Center (CDTI in Spanish initials) ESA also organized a guided tour on the last day through the head offices of three sector companies, SENER, Thales Alenia Space Spain and GMV, all housed in Madrid’s Tres Cantos Technology Park.

The guide for the GMV tour was Mariella Graziano, Manager of GMV’s Robotics and Space Segment, who showed the visitors around different GMV robotics labs like platform-art©, which staged several demos of the projects on which GMV is currently working.

The visitors on this guided tour included many leading figures from the space robotics world, such as Richard Volpe, Manager of the Mobility and Robotic Systems Section of the Autonomous Systems Division of JPL (NASA). Forums of this type are crucial, allowing top professionals to swap notes and share knowledge. The very same ESA section that has organized i-SAIRAS this year also puts on every two years the ASTRA conference, which looks into space automation and robotics.