The Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (UTC) (http://www.utcluj.ro/en/) is among the 4 top technical universities in Romania. UTC has ample resources (human, financial, infrastructure) and experience in the management of international projects: it has been involved in more than 50 European and hundreds of national research projects in cooperation with academia and industry, both as coordinator and partner. This project involves the Robotics and Nonlinear Control (ROCON, http://rocon.utcluj.ro) group of the Automation Department, where key expertise points are mobile robot sensing, mapping, and control; machine learning and artificial intelligence; cooperative control; and nonlinear state estimation and control applied to robotics.

The Automation Department numbers around 40 staff and more than 25 PhD students. ROCON itself is a young group containing several graduate students as well as young top researchers in their field who recently returned with expertise accumulated at top institutes abroad (e.g. TU Delft in the Netherlands, INRIA and CNRS in France, KU Leuven in Belgium, Bern University in Switzerland). In the few years since its founding, ROCON has already been supported by multiple financed grants of ~1MEUR, including national Young Team projects, international and European cooperation projects, and industry funding. The network of the group includes labs in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary, Croatia, Australia, etc.