Following the great success of our previous Summer Schools in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024, we are excited to announce the IEEE RAS Summer School 2025 that will take place on July 30 - August 5, 2025. As in past years, the 2025 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems will be held at the campus of Czech Technical University, located in the heart of the beautiful and historic city of Prague. The Summer School aims to promote the latest achievements in Multi-Robot Systems research, targeting students, academic researchers, and industrial practitioners. Our goal is to enable practical application of systems of cooperating robots and to encourage networking among participants. The main focus of the 2025 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems includes lectures by well-recognized experts in the field, and hands-on experience which will enable you to engage in real-world experiments using state-of-the-art aerial platforms developed specifically for Multi-Robot research. Join us at the Czech Technical University in Prague to advance your knowledge, share experiences, and explore the cutting-edge developments in Multi-Robot Systems. Stay tuned for further details!
The goal of Summer School 2025 is to provide students and young researchers with the knowledge, ideas, and experience of the best experts in the field of Multi-Robot Systems in a comprehensive and effective way. We want to provide you with the theoretical and practical overview required to bring your MRS research from scientific achievements to practical deployment and verification.
Based on your preference, you will be grouped with other students of the same research interests to encourage networking possibilities and to gain deeper knowledge in the selected domain of MRS. During the group seminars, tasks relevant to an individual scope of students will be discussed and tackled.
Following the lectures, you will get the opportunity to implement learned methodology into a fully functional robotic system. You will see your results first-hand during the real experiments conducted at the end of the school under the supervision of experienced researchers in the field of swarm robotics.
One of the most attractive parts of the Summer School is the practical exercise conducted by all participants on the last day of the session. This unique opportunity of working hands-on with real aerial multi-robot systems utilizes knowledge gained at the school and may be crucial in your future research. The best performing students will be awarded with a small souvenir.
On several days of the Summer School, an evening social program is organized to give you the chance to both relax after a tough day of lectures and exercises, and to network among other participants and lecturers. A variety of events take place, including a tour of historic Prague, welcome and farewell parties, and a banquet with a social program.
Watch the highlights video here or check the 2024 Summer School website to see more.
The 2024 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems was a pivotal event that brought together students, researchers, and industry professionals to explore the latest advancements in cooperative robotic systems. The program featured expert lectures on the theory and applications of multi-robot technologies, alongside hands-on experiments with cutting-edge aerial platforms developed for this field. Participants gained practical experience in deploying multi-robot systems, deepening their understanding of the challenges and potential of these technologies. The event also fostered valuable networking opportunities, connecting academia with industry and paving the way for future innovations in multi-robot systems.
Watch the highlights video here or check the 2023 Summer School website to see more.
The 2023 IEEE RAS Summer School featured a dynamic program that combined theoretical lectures, seminars and practical exercises. The participants had the unique opportunity to implement learned methodology into a fully functional robotic system. One of the Summer School’s highlights was the outdoor practical task, which involved the inspection of electrical power infrastructure using real UAVs.
You can either visit the 2022 Summer School website or watch the highlights video.
The 2022 IEEE RAS Summer School was focused on deployment of MRS in real-world conditions being motivated by EU Aerial-Core project and DARPA SubTChallenge. The Summer School promoted the newest achievements in Multi-Robot Systems research to students, academic researchers, and industrial practitioners to enable putting systems of cooperating robots into practice.
You can find the 2020 Summer School highlights here! You can also visit the past website.
The main scope of the 2020 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems focused on swarm robotics, including lectures by well-recognized experts in the field, and hands-on experience with real-world experiments using state-of-the-art aerial platforms developed for Multi-Robot research.
Check out this short video and be sure to visit the Summer School 2019 website.
The content for this year was focused on cooperating aerial vehicles. The topics addressed by the attending expert lecturers were structured to give the participants the necessary knowledge for understanding existing theory and for realisation of real-world experiments with a fleet of autonomous micro aerial vehicles.
Interesting and recognized experts in the field will come to Prague and give lectures on MRS related topics. To see who came to Prague during the last sessions, check the respective sites 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
the University of Naples Federico II
Bruno Siciliano is a Professor of Robotics and Control at the University of Naples Federico II. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Óbuda, where he holds the Kálmán Chair. His research interests include manipulation and control, human–robot cooperation, and service robotics.
A Fellow of several scientific societies, including IEEE, ASME, IFAC, and AAIA, he has received numerous international prizes and awards, including the 2024 IEEE Robotics and Automation Pioneer Award. He served as President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2008 to 2009.
Professor Siciliano has delivered over 150 keynote lectures and has published more than 300 papers and 7 books. His book "Robotics" is one of the most widely adopted academic texts worldwide, while his edited volume, the "Springer Handbook of Robotics," received the highest recognition for scientific publishing: the 2008 PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics.
His team has secured more than 25 million Euros in funding over the past 15 years from competitive European research projects, including two ERC grants. For further details, visit http://wpage.unina.it/sicilian/.
Konstanz
Prof. Dr. Iain D. Couzin is the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and a Professor, as well as the Director (Speaker) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Excellence Cluster “Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previously, he was a Full Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University.
His research seeks to uncover the fundamental principles underlying evolved collective behavior, spanning a diverse range of biological systems—from neural collectives to insect swarms, fish schools, and primate groups—as well as engineered systems such as bio-mimetic robotics.
In recognition of his contributions, he has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Searle Scholar Award (2008), recognition for one of the top five most cited papers of the decade in animal behavior research (1999–2010), the National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award (2012), the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London (2013), and the Web of Science Global Highly Cited Researcher designation (2018–2022, 2024).
Additionally, he has been honored with the Lagrange Prize for fundamental contributions to complexity science (2019), the Falling Walls Life Sciences Award, and Germany’s highest research honor, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2022). More recently, he was awarded the Rothschild Distinguished Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2023), the Fyssen International Prize (2024), and the President’s Medal of the Royal Society of Entomology (2025).
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dušan Stipanović is a Professor in the Controls Group of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Belgrade, then Yugoslavia, in 1994, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, in 1996 and 2000, respectively. Dr. Stipanović had been an Adjunct Lecturer and Research Associate with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara University (1998-2001), and a Research Associate in Professor Claire Tomlin’s Hybrid Systems Laboratory of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University (2001-2004).
In 2004 he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is now Professor in the Controls Group of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering. He is a visiting Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Belgrade in Serbia, and in the Robotics and Telematics Department at the University of Würzburg in Germany. He also held visiting faculty positions in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley.
His research interests include decentralized control and estimation, stability theory, optimal control, and differential games, with applications in control of autonomous vehicles, machine learning, precision agriculture, circuits, and telerehabilitation. Dr. Stipanović served as an Associate Editor on the Editorial Boards of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I and II, and Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. He is a recipient of the Bessel Award in Mathematics (calculus of variations and control theory) from the Humboldt Foundation and 1000 Talents Award from the People’s Republic of China.
Dr. Stipanović is an IEEE Fellow and a Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA). Dr. Stipanović was ranked by ScholarGPS in 2022 at #3 on the lifetime Collision Avoidance System list, and his Erdős number is 3.
School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology
Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering at University of Bristol. She leads a team of 20 researchers working on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics (https://hauertlab.com/).
Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL. She’s PI or Co-I on more than 30M GBP in grant funding and has served on national and international committees, including the UK Robotics Growth Partnership, the Royal Society Working Group on Machine Learning, and several IEEE boards.
She is on the board of directors of the Open Source Robotics Foundation and is Executive Trustee of non-profits robohub.org and aihub.org, which connect the robotics and AI communities to the public.
University of Verona
Alessandro Farinelli is a Full Professor at the University of Verona, Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on developing novel methodologies for artificial intelligence systems applied to robotics and cyber-physical systems. In particular, he specializes in multi-agent coordination, decentralized optimization, reinforcement learning, and data analysis for cyber-physical systems.
Alessandro Farinelli has been the principal investigator for several national and international research projects in the broad field of artificial intelligence. His research contributions are primarily published in international journals in the fields of artificial intelligence (e.g., Artificial Intelligence Journal and Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research) and autonomous robotic systems (Autonomous Robots and Robotics and Autonomous Systems).
He actively contributes to major scientific conferences, both as an organizer and speaker, including the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Johannes Betz is a Professor of Autonomous Vehicle Systems at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), with a background in automotive engineering, electric drive systems, and software development.
He studied automotive engineering at Coburg University of Applied Sciences (B. Eng., 2013) and at the University of Bayreuth (M. Sc., 2013). From 2013 to 2018, he was a research assistant at TUM, where he earned his Dr.-Ing. degree in 2019 with a dissertation on "Evaluation of an intelligent fleet dispatching for mixed vehicle fleets."
Between 2018 and 2020, Johannes was a postdoc at the Department of Automotive Engineering at TUM, where he founded the TUM Autonomous Motorsport Team, which successfully participated in the autonomous racing series Roborace and Indy Autonomous Challenge. From 2020 to 2022, he continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, working in the xLab for Safe Autonomous Systems.
In 2023, he was appointed as Rudolf Mößbauer Professor at TUM, where he leads the Autonomous Vehicle Systems Professorship within the Department of Mobility Systems, focusing on advancements in autonomous driving technology and intelligent vehicle systems.
Multi-Robot Systems Group, FEE CTU
Prof. Ing. Martin Saska, Dr. rer. nat., is the founder and head of the Multi-Robot Systems Lab at Czech Technical University in Prague (http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/) . He is also a co-founder of The Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems, where over 70 researchers collaborate on cutting-edge robotics research (https://robotics.fel.cvut.cz/cras/).
Martin earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, in 2009, as part of the PhD program of the Elite Network of Bavaria. He further expanded his expertise through visiting scholar positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2008, and at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in 2012, 2014, and 2016, where he worked with Vijay Kumar’s group within the GRASP Lab.
He has authored or co-authored over 150 publications in peer-reviewed conferences, receiving multiple best paper awards, and more than 50 publications in high-impact journals, including IJRR, AURO, JFR, ASC, and EJC. His research contributions have been cited over 5,500 times according to Google Scholar, with an H-index of 41.
Martin’s team has achieved significant success in international robotics competitions, winning multiple challenges in MBZIRC 2017, MBZIRC 2020, and the DARPA SubT competitions.
The program offers four days of lectures and practical sessions in the PC lab, followed by a fifth day dedicated to your own experiments.
In addition, a vibrant social program is included, featuring a welcome party, guided tours of Prague (including a tour of the historic city center, which is covered by the registration fee), and a festive banquet. Networking coffee breaks offer ample opportunities to connect with peers. Optional weekend trips to the historic town of Kutná Hora — known not only for its UNESCO-listed architecture but also as the setting of the immersive video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance — or to Karlštejn Castle and the charming Old Town of Prague provide a perfect balance of learning and exploration.
The Summer School adopts a selective approach to ensure a high standard of participants. There will be several selection rounds scheduled. After each round, applicants will be notified by email regarding their selection status. Successful applicants will also receive payment details - the payment deadline is within 14 days after providing payment information.
