Three final candidates attended the first prize ceremony of the international Robotdalen Scientific Award, set up by the Swedish robotics cluster Robotdalen. Dr Eric Demeester from Katholieke Universiteit in Belgium won the Robotdalen Scientific Award 2007 with his thesis “User-adapted plan recognition and shared control for wheelchair driver assistance under uncertainty”and received € 20 000.
The jury’s statement on the winning thesis was: A beautifully organized and prepared application describing the candidate's research in human-robot interaction with the crucial goal of "understanding what the user had in mind", excellently implemented in the important domain of intelligent wheelchair mobility. The jury was impressed by the importance of the underlying problem and the relevance of the application domain, the extensibility of the approach, and the integration of theory, modelling, and hands-on implementation.
The two other final candidates are Bram Vanderborght from Virje Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and Mike Stilman from Carnegie Mellon University, USA, who both received honorary mentions and a prize sum of 1 000 euro each.
