TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Reasoning with Qualitative Positional Information for Domestic Domains in the Situation Calculus JF - Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems Y1 - 2011 SN - 0921-0296 VL - 63 IS - 2 SP - 273 EP - 300 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011) JF - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011) Y1 - 2010 SP - 1 EP - 10 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Caesar: an intelligent domestic service robot JF - Intelligent service robotics N2 - 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 Y1 - 2012 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11370-012-0118-y SN - 1861-2776 N1 - Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Robotics: Sensing, Representation and Action, Part I VL - 5 IS - 4 SP - 259 EP - 276 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Fuzzy representations and control for domestic service robots in Golog T2 - Intelligent robotics and applications : 4th International conference, ICIRA 2011, Aachen, Germany, December 6-8, 2011, proceedings, part I. (Lecture notes in computer science ; 7102) Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-642-25486-4 SP - 241 EP - 250 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Abstracting Away Low-Level Details in Service Robotics with Fuzzy Fluents JF - Model-Driven Knowledge Engineering for Improved Software Modularity in Robotics and Automation. Workshop at European Robotics Forum 2015 Vienna, Austria, March 11-13, 2015. Y1 - 2015 SP - 1 EP - 4 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Decision-Theoretic Planning with Linguistic Terms in Golog T2 - 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. Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0074-1424-4 SN - 1613-0073 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Decision-Theoretic Planning with Fuzzy Notions in GOLOG JF - International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems N2 - 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. Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S0218488516400134 SN - 1793-6411 VL - 24 IS - Issue Suppl. 2 SP - 123 EP - 143 PB - World Scientific CY - Singapur ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - A System Layout for Cognitive Service Robots T2 - Cognitive Robot Architectures. Proceedings of EUCognition 2016 Y1 - 2017 SN - 1613-0073 N1 - CEUR-WS Vol-1855 SP - 44 EP - 45 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age JF - Multimodal Technologies Interact N2 - 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. Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mti2040064 SN - 2414-4088 VL - 2 IS - 4 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rens, Gavin A1 - Varzinczak, Ivan A1 - Meyer, Thomas A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - A Logic for Reasoning about Actions and Explicit Observations JF - AI 2010: Advances in Artificial Intelligence 23rd Australasian Joint Conference, Adelaide, Australia, December 7-10, 2010. Proceedings Y1 - 2010 SN - 978-3-642-17431-5 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 6464 SP - 395 EP - 404 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Rens, Gavin A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Poel, Etienne van der T1 - Extending DTGolog to deal with POMD-Ps T2 - Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA 2008) Y1 - 2008 SP - 49 EP - 54 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rens, Gavin A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Belief-node condensation for online POMDP algorithms N2 - 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 Y1 - 2013 SP - 1 EP - 7 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Reke, Michael A1 - Peter, Daniel A1 - Schulte-Tigges, Joschua A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Walter, Thomas A1 - Matheis, Dominik T1 - A Self-Driving Car Architecture in ROS2 T2 - 2020 International SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA Conference, Cape Town, South Africa Y1 - 2020 SN - 978-1-7281-4162-6 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA48453.2020.9041020 SP - 1 EP - 6 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Rebel, Sören A1 - Hüning, Felix A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - MQOne: Low-cost design for a rugged-terrain robot platform T2 - 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) N2 - 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. Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-3-319-22875-4 (print) ; 978-3-319-22876-1 (E-Book) U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22876-1_19 SP - 209 EP - 221 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Priede, Gareth A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Towards passive walking for the fully-actuated biped robot Nao T2 - Emerging trends in computing, informatics, systems sciences, and engineering. (Lecture notes in electrical engineering : vol. 151) N2 - 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. Y1 - 2013 SN - 978-1-4614-3557-0 ; 978-1-4614-3558-7 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3558-7_18 SP - 225 EP - 236 PB - Springer CY - New York, NY ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Nikolovski, Gjorgji A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Nessau, Hendrik A1 - Reke, Michael A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Model-predictive control with parallelised optimisation for the navigation of autonomous mining vehicles T2 - 2023 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) N2 - 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. KW - Mpc KW - Control KW - Path-following KW - Navigation KW - Automation Y1 - 2023 SN - 979-8-3503-4691-6 (Online) SN - 979-8-3503-4692-3 (Print) U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IV55152.2023.10186806 N1 - IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Vehicle, 4.-7. June 2023, Anchorage, AK, USA. PB - IEEE ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Reuter, S. A1 - Ewert, D. A1 - Jeschke, S. A1 - Pensky, D. A1 - Karras, Ulrich T1 - Proposal for advancements to the LLSF in 2014 and beyond Y1 - 2013 SP - Publ. online ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Aspects of integrating diverse software into robotic systems extended abstract T2 - ICRA 2013 - 8th Workshop on Software Development and Integration in Robotics (SDIR), Karlsruhe, Germany Y1 - 2013 SP - 1 EP - 2 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard A1 - Ferrein, Alexander ED - Boots, Byron T1 - Incremental task-level reasoning in a competitive factory automation scenario T2 - 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) Y1 - 2013 SN - 9781577356011 SP - 43 EP - 48 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - A Lua-based Behavior Engine for Controlling the Humanoid Robot Nao JF - RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII Y1 - 2010 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 5949 SP - 240 EP - 251 ER -