Mobile Robots #09 - Logistics & Rescue Drones

Get ready for our most cutting-edge meetup yet, where we're diving deep into the intersection of AI, robotics, and the physical world!

### 🎯 What's On The Menu?

### 1️⃣ Physical AI: The Next Frontier in Robotics

Speaker: Christopher Schütte
Product Portfolio Manager, Siemens - Applications for Advanced Robotics

What the industry still hasn’t solved - and why. Where new growth opportunities for robotics are emerging and how mature they really are. And why your last online order matters.

Today’s automation thrives in stable, predictable settings—but one of robotics’ toughest challenges is still manipulating objects in messy, changing environments. While manufacturing has long standardized processes for machines, intralogistics mirrors real-world human complexity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in e-commerce piece picking: a deceptively simple task that continues to rely heavily on human hands.
Robot vision made progress, but early systems were rigid. AI vision unlocked grasping of unknown objects, and now large foundation models are pushing sense–reason–act closer to human intuition. This talk explores the new frontier: which solutions truly work today, what remains hype, and the real obstacles holding back wider adoption.

### 2️⃣ CloudTrack: Scalable UAV Tracking with Cloud Semantics

Speaker: Yannik Blei
PhD Candidate & AI/Robotics Researcher, Technical University Nürnberg (UTN)

Get ready for some mind-blowing research that could literally save lives! Our UTN researcher will present their groundbreaking paper on CloudTrack - a game-changing approach to semantically conditioned open vocabulary object tracking designed specifically for search and rescue UAV operations.

This is research-to-industry knowledge transfer at its finest - here's what makes this approach special: imagine describing a missing person with just words - "person in red jacket" - and having a drone autonomously track them from aerial footage. No specialized training, no complex setup, just pure AI-powered semantic understanding!

## ⏱️ Agenda

18:00 - Doors open & networking begins
18:30 - Welcome & intro from hosts at ATHEM
18:45 - Talk 1: Physical AI deep dive (30 min + Q&A)
19:30 - Short break & networking
19:45 - Talk 2: CloudTrack presentation (30 min + Q&A)
20:30 - Open networking and drinks
21:30 - Event wrap-up

## 📍Location Details

Hosted by our amazing friends at ATHEM.space - an open creativity space next to Friedrich-Ebert-Platz and very easy to reach! Exit at Friedrich-Ebert-Platz, head towards Bucher Straße 79.
Then straigth trough the gate and into the white building in front of you. See the image attached for supportive instructions.