Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup #16
It’s our 16th CRAIC event, and we’d love to see you there—don't miss out!
Where?
This time, we will be hosting the event in hub:raum Kraków, Przemysłowa 12, 30-701 Kraków, Poland
When?
29.06.2026 Start at 17:30
Agenda:
18:15 - Mariusz Szczepanik - Building Autonomous Drones with ROS 2: From Behavior Trees to Flight Controllers - Designing autonomous inspection drones means connecting high-level mission logic with low-level hardware control. In this practical session, you’ll see how to build these systems with ROS 2.
We’ll walk through a typical drone architecture, including MAVLink-based communication between flight controllers such as PX4 and ArduPilot, companion computers, and ground control stations such as QGroundControl (QGC).
The session then moves into mission logic. We’ll compare traditional state machines with behaviour trees (BTs) and introduce inspection_bt, a flight-controller-agnostic framework built for complex inspection scenarios, with state visualisation through Groot2.
Finally, we’ll look at safety and testability. You’ll learn how simulation environments such as Gazebo and Spyrosoft’s open-source rtest framework can help reduce flaky tests and support a reliable, repeatable CI environment for ROS 2.
Join the session to see how a cohesive open-source stack can accelerate autonomous drone development.
19:15 - Short break and networking!
19:30 - Kseniia Sych - Homemade RAG System for Answering D&D Rules Questions - Just as a Dungeon Master relies on the rulebook, AI models need context to provide accurate answers. In this talk, we’ll take a look at a toy example of an AI assistant designed to answer questions about Dungeons & Dragons 5e rules. Despite its simplicity, the system contains all the essential components of a production-ready RAG system.
20:30 - Short break and networking!
20:45 - Łukasz Wojnarowski - Smart Go Board: Tracking Stones with Embedded Tech and ML - The Andromeda project represents a unique intersection of traditional tabletop gaming and modern embedded engineering. This project transforms a physical 9x9 Go board into an intelligent, digitally synced device. Using a custom, self-assembled PCBA and edge computing, stone placements are detected via infrared sensors and transmitted in real time via Bluetooth. A dedicated PC application then leverages a machine learning algorithm to interpret the sensor data and calibrate environmental variables before instantly displaying the game state. This presentation will include a live demo to showcase the full hardware-to-software pipeline.
21:30- Lightning Talks and networking!
Details of the speakers:
Mariusz Szczepanik: As the Head of Robotics at Spyrosoft Synergy and a Principal Engineer, Mariusz leads robotics projects with a heavy focus on ROS 2, autonomous navigation, and sensor fusion. His expertise spans from high-level autonomy and architecture down to integration with flight controllers. He is deeply committed to engineering excellence, focusing on how to design, test, and deploy stable, production-ready autonomous robots and UAVs. He is also an active contributor to open-source robotics solutions and ecosystems, helping drive innovation and collaboration within the robotics community. In addition, Mariusz has shared his expertise on international stages, including as a speaker at ROSCon in Singapore, where he presented Rtest, an open-source testing framework designed and developed at Spyrosoft to improve the quality, reliability, and efficiency of testing in ROS-based systems.
[ENG] Kseniia Sych : A Lead Machine Learning Engineer at VirtusLab, she builds recommendation systems by day and plays D&D by night. With a Master’s in Computer Science and nearly a decade of experience in the IT industry, her career has been an adventure of its own—from backend ecommerce development to ML engineering in automotive R&D, and now back to ecommerce.
Łukasz Wojnarowski: Currently E/E Lead Engineer at Aptiv. 9 years of experience in Home Appliances and Automotive Industry sectors. He holds a Master’s degree from the Poznań University of Technology with a specialization in Automation. He's passionate with regard to Embedded Systems, applying small AI models on cost effective hardware.
The meeting sponsors are:
Want to be a speaker? Reach out to us at cracow.robotics@gmail.com or via LinkedIn!
About our sponsors:
hub:raum is all about 5G, AI, IoT and the Next Next (any tech that will revolutionize your daily life). Equipped with a 5G testbed, a makers’ space, a 3D printer, and more, we can provide your startup with the tech you need to test your prototype. We’re also excited to provide startups with a professional AR and VR room with edge computing infrastructure for game development purposes.
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Weekly Robotics’ mission is to “champion open-source projects and high-quality, informative content related to robotics”. The newsletter was started in August 2018 by Mat Sadowski, a dev relations engineer at Foxglove.
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Spyrosoft is a group of companies providing consulting and software development services in segments including Automotive, HR Tech, EduTech, Finance, Geospatial, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Industry 4.0, Renewable Energy, Media and Robotics. The Group offers a one-stop shop approach as it operates within a wide range of specialities – from Enterprise and Embedded Software Engineering, AI/ML, Cloud and Cybersecurity, to HMI or Ecommerce, Low-code and CRM Platforms.
Spyrosoft is a global company with over 2000 specialists on board and 22 offices in 10 countries. The firm has been included in the Financial Times ranking of 1000 fastest-growing companies for three consecutive years: 2021, 2022 and 2023.