🌌 Indeed, auroras are becoming more frequent in regions of Russia where they were previously rare.

This is due to an increase in solar activity, which leads to more solar flares and plasma ejections. As a result, geomagnetic storms occur on Earth, which can cause northern lights even in regions such as Moscow and the Moscow region.

It is important to note that the northern lights are not only a beautiful natural phenomenon, but also an important indicator of space weather. Studying space weather allows us to better understand the processes occurring on the Sun and in our solar system.

If you are interested in space weather research, the Engineering Systems MSc and PhD programs may be a great choice for you. These programs offer the opportunity to gain first-class knowledge of solar physics and to present at leading conferences around the world.

📸 Moskva s ogon'kom

🎥 Open access almanac "16 Ways to Change the World" - 16 short films about the latest research of Skoltech scientists.

The films were the result of Russia's first Science Film Lab, organised by FANC together with director Yulia Kiseleva.

The collection includes two short films featuring researchers from Skoltech's Center for Digital Engineering, "8 Minutes" and "Is the Quadcopter Man's Friend?"

Director of the Digital Engineering Center, Associate Professor Tatiana Podladchikova and alumna Galina Chikunova became the heroes of the film "8 Minutes", dedicated to space weather and its impact on life on Earth.

PhD students at the Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory Aleksey Fedoseev, Ahmed Basa and Skoltech alumnus Ekaterina Dorzhieva, Ayush Gupta are the main characters in Arthur Sukhonin's film " is a quadcopter Man's Friend?".

Today, quadcopters are a familiar technology. However, what future does await them? Will swarms of drones replace single drones? What difficulties will face those people who will control swarms of drones? And how are these problems being solved today? Young scientists from Skoltech will tell us about this.

❗️Subtitles are available in English.

🎊 Artem Lykov and Artem Bazhenov - master students of the Engineering Systems program from the Laboratory of Intelligent Space Robotics (Skoltech Center for Digital Engineering) presented papers at the 19th annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in the USA. Core A conference ranking.

📄 A. Lykov, M. Litvinov, M. Konenkov, R. Prochii, N. Burtsev, A. A. Abdulkarim, A. Bazhenov, V. Berman, D. Tsetserukou, “CognitiveDog: Large Multimodal Model Based System to Translate Vision and Language into Action of Quadruped Robot”. Paper link.

CognitiveDog of the world’s first quadruped robot that is capable of not only LMM-based communication with humans but also manipulation with objects. Robot analyses multimodal data, i.e. images and voice cues to make conscious actions. Technology considerably widens the application of the intelligent quadruped robots. We have outperformed golden standard by Google DeepMind RT2 for reasoning quality.


📄 A. Bazhenov, V. Berman, S. Satsevich, O. Shalopanova, M. Altamirano Cabrera, A. Lykov, D. Tsetserukou, “DogSurf: Quadruped Robot Capable of GRU-based Surface Recognition for Blind Person Navigation,”. Paper link.

DogSurf is a new approach of using robotic dogs to help visually impaired people navigating in the real world. The presented method allows the quadruped robot to detect slippery surfaces, and to use audio and haptic feedback to inform the user when to stop. A state-of-the-art GRU-based neural network architecture with mean accuracy of 99.925% was proposed for the task of multiclass surface classification for quadruped robots. A dataset was collected on a Unitree Go1 Edu robot. The dataset and code have been posted to the public domain.