Winners of the AIRA Ideas Contest are already known – AI in Robotics Project comes to an end
28/11/2025
On November 28th, PACT – Alentejo Science and Technology Park marked the end of the AIRA Project with a closing session that took place at the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre.
During the event, the main results of the project and the activities developed were presented, including the training that trained more than 500 trainees in the area of the application of artificial intelligence to robotics, and the entrepreneurship program developed and made available in PACT’s Moodle.
This was followed by the presentation of the winning ideas of the AIRA Ideas Competition, by Professor Luís Baptista, Coordinator of the Department of Technologies of the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, and respective pitches, which proved that creativity continues to drive technological innovation.
There were 8 proposals submitted and evaluated by the panel of judges, experts in engineering, technology and entrepreneurship, and 3 ideas were awarded with technological vouchers, for standing out for their originality, namely:
- 1st place: Berrio. It consists of a passive, modular and low-cost underwater robotic system to massify the collection of biodiversity data and support blue economy decisions through automatic species classifiers;
- 2nd place: RPSmartStage. A software that creates an interface between creativity and DMX protocols by automating the technical complexity of lighting systems via computer vision and LLMs.
- 3rd place: AIRA-Inspect. It is an autonomous aircraft inspection system that combines computer vision and mobile robotics to support the ground maintenance process, in an automatic and standardized way.
The participants of the session also had the opportunity to attend the session “Technological and Knowledge Entrepreneurship”, presented by Professor Paulo Ferreira, Pro-President for Research, Innovation and Technology Transfer of the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, integrated in the Bootcamp “Green Hydrogen: Innovation and Entrepreneurship”.
With AIRA, PACT reinforces its role in the training of deep tech skills across Europe, contributing to the training and retention of skilled labor in the region.
The AIRA Project is funded by the European Union, through EIT Deep Tech Talent, and developed in partnership between PACT and the University of Ljubljana.
