The Fulbright scholarship and its purposes

Petar has, as one of only very few researchers each year, been granted the Fulbright scholarship, and after a long and complicated but instructive application process, the time has come for Petar and his family to travel to the US and begin their adventure.

The Fulbright scholarship program supports research within various fields and focuses on the cooperation between Denmark and the US based on the idea that the differences between the countries offer a lot to learn for researchers from both countries. Besides the scientific research, the Fulbright program also focuses on exchange of cultural knowledge and the program is very renowned and respected, especially in the US.

Hopes for an instructive experience and cultural exchange

For Petar, the process of being granted the scholarship began with an urge to travel and explore a different part of the world. When he was urged to apply, it was an opportunity too good to miss out on, and he reached out to Dr. Silvia Ferrari with a project idea about visual communication between multi-robot systems in offshore energy systems. The grant required a full syllabus describing the project and the lectures, Petar is going to teach at Cornell University. This meant a lot of work but at the same time it has also been very educational.

The goal of the project is to develop a visual communication channel to be used in a Deep Reinforcement Learning framework for a team of robots, improving the robustness of these systems and their efficiency. Parts of Petar’s teaching is going to focus on robot perception, but a big part of the program is also to exchange knowledge about the Danish culture and teach the American students about the differences in work culture, ways of teaching and especially about PBL and its use at AAU: “I am going to talk about how I teach at AAU using PBL and observe the differences between our methods. Hopefully we can learn new methods on both sides”, Petar says.

Petar hopes to have a great experience with his family, but also to facilitate new research and pave the way for more cooperation between the universities. He imagines that the scholarship can be the start of more work on the project, and he looks forward to working with one of the top researchers in the field while experiencing life and the work culture in the US first-hand.