Current and Future Activities

The main IFAC event this year was the 21st IFAC World Congress (WC) in Berlin, which, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, was successfully conducted on July 12-17, 2020 (the actual Congress time frame was wider), primarily remotely, on the Zoom platform. 4,235 entries were received, 93 open tracks invited, 77 invited sessions and 34 pre-conference workshops (which is probably a world record). The 39 chairmen of the technical committees and over 340 collaborating editors did a great deal of organizational and review work. Over 32,290 review requests were sent, 23,318 received, and a total of 13,355 reviews were received. A record number of 2,954 articles and extensive summaries were accepted for the final technical program, as well as PDF files with presentation slides and more than 2,900 videos/screencasts (expressed in over 370 GB of data). The virtual track was divided into 263 virtual sessions: 50 invited sessions, 67 open invitation sessions and 2 late results sessions.

With the next congresses in Yokohama '2023 and Busan' 2026, at the beginning of November this year, the new IFAC president prof. Hajime Asama announced a call to nominate candidates to host the IFAC World Congress in 2029.

During the WC, a remote TC board meeting was held (the slides are presented here).

The next most important event for TC 7.5 to come is, of course, our symposium on "Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles" in the summer of 2022. Vice-chairman TC 7.5, Libor Preucil from the Czech Technical University in Prague (Center for Advanced Field Robotics) will be the organizer of the IFAC Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles Symposium on July 6-8 (Wednesday-Friday). I would like to appeal to TC members to seriously think about the success of the symposium by joining its organization.