Croatian Success Stories

Moderation: Ivan Marković, University of Zagreb

Talk 1: Beyond the Pilot: What It Actually Takes to Scale Autonomous Forklifts, Tomislav Haus, Gideon

Gideon builds Trey, an AI-powered autonomous forklift that loads and unloads trailers in live warehouse and production operations. Getting a robot to work in a pilot is a different problem from getting a fleet to work every shift, and this talk is about the second one. After a brief pass over the core stack — 3D perception, autonomy and fleet orchestration — we turn to what daily production actually demanded: throughput and space efficiency against real operational targets, manipulation cases a pilot never exercises, goods and infrastructure that don’t behave as specified, and enough flexibility to fit processes that differ at every site. Each looked like an edge case at first and proved to be a precondition for volume. 

Tak 2: Perception that grew up in a car: transferring automotive-grade computer vision into robotics, Hrvoje Šamija, Visage Technologies

Visage Technologies has spent over a decade building computer vision that ships in production vehicles — face and gaze tracking, driver and occupant monitoring, and ADAS perception developed inside the constraints of automotive: fixed silicon budgets, intense validation requirements, and functional safety process discipline. Those constraints turn out to be valuable knowledge for wider application. This talk examines what happens when that stack and expertise is applied to new domains: human-aware machines and operator monitoring, off-highway autonomy, visual inspection in pharma and medical fields, and defence. Using driver monitoring as the worked example, we cover what genuinely transfers—real-time inference on constrained hardware, corner-case discovery, and validation rigor—and what does not: the missing datasets, the absent sensor standards, and the regulatory landscapes that still lag behind automotive.  

Talk 3: GrapOS in the wild: A safety-critical RTOS finding its place in robotics and beyond, Sandro Margeta, Končar Electrical Engineering Institute

KONČAR - Electrical Engineering Institute is primarily known for safety-critical systems in railway and power electronics, certified up to SIL 4. At the heart of those systems is GrapOS, our in-house real-time operating system designed from the ground up for functional safety applications. This talk explores how GrapOS has been stepping into the robotics and mechatronic space through three projects: a functional-safety-certified proximity protection system for human-robot coexistence in automated warehouses, embedded electronics and firmware for remotely operated vehicles requiring precise real-time control and our latest research effort bridging GrapOS with ROS 2. Along the way, we share what functional safety experience brings to robotic systems development, and what it doesn't.

More information coming soon.