@article{SchifferFerreinLakemeyer2011, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard}, title = {Reasoning with Qualitative Positional Information for Domestic Domains in the Situation Calculus}, series = {Journal of Intelligent \& Robotic Systems}, volume = {63}, journal = {Journal of Intelligent \& Robotic Systems}, number = {2}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Berlin}, isbn = {0921-0296}, pages = {273 -- 300}, year = {2011}, language = {en} } @article{SchifferFerreinLakemeyer2010, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard}, title = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011)}, series = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011)}, journal = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011)}, pages = {1 -- 10}, year = {2010}, language = {en} } @article{SchifferFerreinLakemeyer2012, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard}, title = {Caesar: an intelligent domestic service robot}, series = {Intelligent service robotics}, volume = {5}, journal = {Intelligent service robotics}, number = {4}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Berlin}, issn = {1861-2776}, doi = {10.1007/s11370-012-0118-y}, pages = {259 -- 276}, year = {2012}, abstract = {In this paper we present CAESAR, an intelligent domestic service robot. In domestic settings for service robots complex tasks have to be accomplished. Those tasks benefit from deliberation, from robust action execution and from flexible methods for human-robot interaction that account for qualitative notions used in natural language as well as human fallibility. Our robot CAESAR deploys AI techniques on several levels of its system architecture. On the low-level side, system modules for localization or navigation make, for instance, use of path-planning methods, heuristic search, and Bayesian filters. For face recognition and human-machine interaction, random trees and well-known methods from natural language processing are deployed. For deliberation, we use the robot programming and plan language READYLOG, which was developed for the high-level control of agents and robots; it allows combining programming the behaviour using planning to find a course of action. READYLOG is a variant of the robot programming language Golog. We extended READYLOG to be able to cope with qualitative notions of space frequently used by humans, such as "near" and "far". This facilitates human-robot interaction by bridging the gap between human natural language and the numerical values needed by the robot. Further, we use READYLOG to increase the flexible interpretation of human commands with decision-theoretic planning. We give an overview of the different methods deployed in CAESAR and show the applicability of a system equipped with these AI techniques in domestic service robotics}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{SchifferFerreinLakemeyer2011, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard}, title = {Fuzzy representations and control for domestic service robots in Golog}, series = {Intelligent robotics and applications : 4th International conference, ICIRA 2011, Aachen, Germany, December 6-8, 2011, proceedings, part I. (Lecture notes in computer science ; 7102)}, booktitle = {Intelligent robotics and applications : 4th International conference, ICIRA 2011, Aachen, Germany, December 6-8, 2011, proceedings, part I. (Lecture notes in computer science ; 7102)}, isbn = {978-3-642-25486-4}, pages = {241 -- 250}, year = {2011}, language = {en} } @article{SchifferFerreinLakemeyer2015, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard}, title = {Abstracting Away Low-Level Details in Service Robotics with Fuzzy Fluents}, series = {Model-Driven Knowledge Engineering for Improved Software Modularity in Robotics and Automation. Workshop at European Robotics Forum 2015 Vienna, Austria, March 11-13, 2015.}, journal = {Model-Driven Knowledge Engineering for Improved Software Modularity in Robotics and Automation. Workshop at European Robotics Forum 2015 Vienna, Austria, March 11-13, 2015.}, pages = {1 -- 4}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{SchifferFerrein2015, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {Decision-Theoretic Planning with Linguistic Terms in Golog}, series = {FLinAl 2015 - Fuzzy Logic in Artificial Intelligence : Proceedings of the Workshop on Fuzzy Logic in AI (FLinAI-15) co-located with the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015) Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 25, 2015.}, booktitle = {FLinAl 2015 - Fuzzy Logic in Artificial Intelligence : Proceedings of the Workshop on Fuzzy Logic in AI (FLinAI-15) co-located with the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015) Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 25, 2015.}, issn = {1613-0073}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0074-1424-4}, pages = {7 Seiten}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @article{SchifferFerrein2016, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {Decision-Theoretic Planning with Fuzzy Notions in GOLOG}, series = {International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems}, volume = {24}, journal = {International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems}, number = {Issue Suppl. 2}, publisher = {World Scientific}, address = {Singapur}, issn = {1793-6411}, doi = {10.1142/S0218488516400134}, pages = {123 -- 143}, year = {2016}, abstract = {In this paper we present an extension of the action language Golog that allows for using fuzzy notions in non-deterministic argument choices and the reward function in decision-theoretic planning. Often, in decision-theoretic planning, it is cumbersome to specify the set of values to pick from in the non-deterministic-choice-of-argument statement. Also, even for domain experts, it is not always easy to specify a reward function. Instead of providing a finite domain for values in the non-deterministic-choice-of-argument statement in Golog, we now allow for stating the argument domain by simply providing a formula over linguistic terms and fuzzy uents. In Golog's forward-search DT planning algorithm, these formulas are evaluated in order to find the agent's optimal policy. We illustrate this in the Diner Domain where the agent needs to calculate the optimal serving order.}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{SchifferFerrein2017, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {A System Layout for Cognitive Service Robots}, series = {Cognitive Robot Architectures. Proceedings of EUCognition 2016}, booktitle = {Cognitive Robot Architectures. Proceedings of EUCognition 2016}, issn = {1613-0073}, pages = {44 -- 45}, year = {2017}, language = {en} } @article{SchifferFerrein2018, author = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age}, series = {Multimodal Technologies Interact}, volume = {2}, journal = {Multimodal Technologies Interact}, number = {4}, publisher = {MDPI}, address = {Basel}, issn = {2414-4088}, doi = {10.3390/mti2040064}, pages = {15}, year = {2018}, abstract = {In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human-robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents.}, language = {en} } @article{RensVarzinczakMeyeretal.2010, author = {Rens, Gavin and Varzinczak, Ivan and Meyer, Thomas and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {A Logic for Reasoning about Actions and Explicit Observations}, series = {AI 2010: Advances in Artificial Intelligence 23rd Australasian Joint Conference, Adelaide, Australia, December 7-10, 2010. Proceedings}, journal = {AI 2010: Advances in Artificial Intelligence 23rd Australasian Joint Conference, Adelaide, Australia, December 7-10, 2010. Proceedings}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Berlin}, isbn = {978-3-642-17431-5}, pages = {395 -- 404}, year = {2010}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{RensFerreinPoel2008, author = {Rens, Gavin and Ferrein, Alexander and Poel, Etienne van der}, title = {Extending DTGolog to deal with POMD-Ps}, series = {Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA 2008)}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA 2008)}, organization = {Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa}, pages = {49 -- 54}, year = {2008}, language = {en} } @article{RensFerrein2013, author = {Rens, Gavin and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {Belief-node condensation for online POMDP algorithms}, publisher = {IEEE}, address = {New York}, pages = {1 -- 7}, year = {2013}, abstract = {Slightly extended version of the paper accepted at the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Workshop, a special track of IEEE AFRICON-2013, held in Mauritius, 9-12 September 2013}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{RekePeterSchulteTiggesetal.2020, author = {Reke, Michael and Peter, Daniel and Schulte-Tigges, Joschua and Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Walter, Thomas and Matheis, Dominik}, title = {A Self-Driving Car Architecture in ROS2}, series = {2020 International SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA Conference, Cape Town, South Africa}, booktitle = {2020 International SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA Conference, Cape Town, South Africa}, isbn = {978-1-7281-4162-6}, doi = {10.1109/SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA48453.2020.9041020}, pages = {1 -- 6}, year = {2020}, language = {en} } @incollection{RebelHueningScholletal.2015, author = {Rebel, S{\"o}ren and H{\"u}ning, Felix and Scholl, Ingrid and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {MQOne: Low-cost design for a rugged-terrain robot platform}, series = {Intelligent robotics and applications : 8th International Conference, ICIRA 2015, Portsmouth, UK, August 24-27, 2015, Proceedings, Part II (Lecture notes in computer science : vol. 9245)}, booktitle = {Intelligent robotics and applications : 8th International Conference, ICIRA 2015, Portsmouth, UK, August 24-27, 2015, Proceedings, Part II (Lecture notes in computer science : vol. 9245)}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Cham}, isbn = {978-3-319-22875-4 (print) ; 978-3-319-22876-1 (E-Book)}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-22876-1_19}, pages = {209 -- 221}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Rugged terrain robot designs are important for field robotics missions. A number of commercial platforms are available, however, at an impressive price. In this paper, we describe the hardware and software component of a low-cost wheeled rugged-terrain robot. The robot is based on an electric children quad bike and is modified to be driven by wire. In terms of climbing properties, operation time and payload it can compete with some of the commercially available platforms, but at a far lower price.}, language = {en} } @incollection{PriedeFerrein2013, author = {Priede, Gareth and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {Towards passive walking for the fully-actuated biped robot Nao}, series = {Emerging trends in computing, informatics, systems sciences, and engineering. (Lecture notes in electrical engineering : vol. 151)}, booktitle = {Emerging trends in computing, informatics, systems sciences, and engineering. (Lecture notes in electrical engineering : vol. 151)}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {New York, NY}, isbn = {978-1-4614-3557-0 ; 978-1-4614-3558-7}, doi = {10.1007/978-1-4614-3558-7_18}, pages = {225 -- 236}, year = {2013}, abstract = {Many biped robots deploy a form of gait that follows the zero moment point (ZMP) approach, that is, the robot is in a stable position at any point in time. This requires the robot to be fully actuated. While very stable, the draw-backs of this approach are a fairly slow gait and high energy consumption. An alternative approach is the so-called passive-dynamic walking, where the gait makes use of the inertia and dynamic stability of the robot. In this paper we describe our ongoing work of combining the principles of passive-dynamic walking on the fully-actuated biped robot Nao, which is also deployed for robotic soccer applications. We present a simple controller that allows the robot to stably rock sidewards, showing a closed limit-cycle. We discuss first results of superimposing a forward motion on the sidewards motion. Based on this we expect to endow the Nao with a fast, robust, and stable passive-dynamic walk on the fully-actuated Nao in the future.}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{NikolovskiLimpertNessauetal.2023, author = {Nikolovski, Gjorgji and Limpert, Nicolas and Nessau, Hendrik and Reke, Michael and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {Model-predictive control with parallelised optimisation for the navigation of autonomous mining vehicles}, series = {2023 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)}, booktitle = {2023 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)}, publisher = {IEEE}, isbn = {979-8-3503-4691-6 (Online)}, doi = {10.1109/IV55152.2023.10186806}, pages = {6 Seiten}, year = {2023}, abstract = {The work in modern open-pit and underground mines requires the transportation of large amounts of resources between fixed points. The navigation to these fixed points is a repetitive task that can be automated. The challenge in automating the navigation of vehicles commonly used in mines is the systemic properties of such vehicles. Many mining vehicles, such as the one we have used in the research for this paper, use steering systems with an articulated joint bending the vehicle's drive axis to change its course and a hydraulic drive system to actuate axial drive components or the movements of tippers if available. To address the difficulties of controlling such a vehicle, we present a model-predictive approach for controlling the vehicle. While the control optimisation based on a parallel error minimisation of the predicted state has already been established in the past, we provide insight into the design and implementation of an MPC for an articulated mining vehicle and show the results of real-world experiments in an open-pit mine environment.}, language = {en} } @article{NiemuellerLakemeyerFerreinetal.2013, author = {Niem{\"u}ller, Tim and Lakemeyer, Gerhard and Ferrein, Alexander and Reuter, S. and Ewert, D. and Jeschke, S. and Pensky, D. and Karras, Ulrich}, title = {Proposal for advancements to the LLSF in 2014 and beyond}, pages = {Publ. online}, year = {2013}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{NiemuellerLakemeyerFerrein2013, author = {Niem{\"u}ller, Tim and Lakemeyer, Gerhard and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {Aspects of integrating diverse software into robotic systems extended abstract}, series = {ICRA 2013 - 8th Workshop on Software Development and Integration in Robotics (SDIR), Karlsruhe, Germany}, booktitle = {ICRA 2013 - 8th Workshop on Software Development and Integration in Robotics (SDIR), Karlsruhe, Germany}, pages = {1 -- 2}, year = {2013}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{NiemuellerLakemeyerFerrein2013, author = {Niem{\"u}ller, Tim and Lakemeyer, Gerhard and Ferrein, Alexander}, title = {Incremental task-level reasoning in a competitive factory automation scenario}, series = {Designing intelligent robots : reintegrating AI II ; papers from the AAAI spring symposium ; [held March 25 - 27, 2013 in Palo Alto, California, USA, on the campus of Stanford University]. (Technical Report / Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence ; 2013,4)}, booktitle = {Designing intelligent robots : reintegrating AI II ; papers from the AAAI spring symposium ; [held March 25 - 27, 2013 in Palo Alto, California, USA, on the campus of Stanford University]. (Technical Report / Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence ; 2013,4)}, editor = {Boots, Byron}, organization = {American Association for Artificial Intelligence}, isbn = {9781577356011}, pages = {43 -- 48}, year = {2013}, language = {en} } @article{NiemuellerFerreinLakemeyer2010, author = {Niem{\"u}ller, Tim and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard}, title = {A Lua-based Behavior Engine for Controlling the Humanoid Robot Nao}, series = {RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII}, journal = {RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII}, pages = {240 -- 251}, year = {2010}, language = {en} }