How the LIRA lab was born. A small story about the lab.
In 2022, the Biorobotics lab had no members working on any project. All of it’s members started to leave when the Covid-19 pandemic started. All of the current projects and teams (Robocup@Home, Robocup@SPL, Logistics, etc.) stopped working during the two years that we were confined at our homes. Most of the teammates left to start their careers.
During the pandemic, I was taking the Mobile Robots course from Prof. Negrete (which I really liked). After the course, I told Ruth to take the course and she also loved the subject. In 2023, when the lockdown finished, we reached out to him to see if we could complete our social service (which is mandatory at the university) in the Biorobotics lab. He accepted us both and we were asked to choose one project:
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Justina: the famous university robot that participated in Robocup@HOME and with a long history of development at the Biorobotics lab. Justina had many members and lots of development all the time.
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AutoModelCar: a new project regarding autonomous driving of an RC sized automobile which will participate at the Mexican Robotics Tournament.
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Pumanoids: A humanoid robot project to compete at Robocup@Soccer league. It was very popular in 2010 and had many members from different universities, but it was abandoned later on.
Ruth and Miguel chose Pumanoids, while another student, Hector Robles, chose the AutoModel project.
Both of this projects were not at the same lab as Justina or Logistics. This projects were in another lab (abandoned at the time) at the basement of building T, which we now know as the LIRA lab. Back then, we only called it “the lab”, as we were not any formal organization or student society.
In 2023, the lab only had 4 students: Ruth, Hector, Andres and me. In this year, Andres joined to complete his bachelor’s thesis. He also did a lot of development of the Nimbro robot and after he graduated, Andres started working for Ford Motor Company. Hector continued working on the AutoModelCar project. He won 1st Place in 2022.
