TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - Looking back on 20 Years of RoboCup JF - KI - Künstliche Intelligenz Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13218-016-0443-y SN - 1610-1987 VL - 30 IS - 3-4 SP - 321 EP - 323 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - McPhillips, Graeme A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Potgieter, Anet T1 - Team Zadeat 2009 : team report Y1 - 2009 VL - 6 SP - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - McPhillips, Graeme A1 - Potgieter, Anet T1 - RoboCup Standard Platform League - Team Zadeat : an intercontinental research effort Y1 - 2008 SP - 1 EP - 7 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - McPhillips, Graeme A1 - Potgieter, Anet T1 - Establishing the RoboCup Standard League in Africa - applying for the RoboCup Standard League with a German-Austrian-South African Research Project Y1 - 2007 SP - 1 EP - 5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - Vassos, Stavros T1 - Action-Based Imperative Programming with YAGI N2 - Many tasks for autonomous agents or robots are best described by a specification of the environment and a specification of the available actions the agent or robot can perform. Combining such a specification with the possibility to imperatively program a robot or agent is what we call the actionbased imperative programming. One of the most successful such approaches is Golog. In this paper, we draft a proposal for a new robot programming language YAGI, which is based on the action-based imperative programming paradigm. Our goal is to design a small, portable stand-alone YAGI interpreter. We combine the benefits of a principled domain specification with a clean, small and simple programming language, which does not exploit any side-effects from the implementation language. We discuss general requirements of action-based programming languages and outline YAGI, our action-based language approach which particularly aims at embeddability. Y1 - 2012 N1 - Cognitive Robotics AAAI Technical Report WS-12-06 SP - 24 EP - 31 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Strack, Andreas A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Laser-Based Localization with Sparse Landmarks / Strack, Andreas ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard JF - RoboCup 2005: Robot Soccer World Cup IX Y1 - 2006 SN - 978-3-540-35437-6 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 4020 SP - 569 EP - 576 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gspandl, Stephan A1 - Pill, Ingo A1 - Reip, Michael A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Belief Management for High-Level Robot Programs JF - Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence [electronic resource] : Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, 16 - 22 July 2011 / sponsored by International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Ed. by Toby Walsh Y1 - 2011 N1 - International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence ; (22 : ; 2011.07.16-22 : ; Barcelona, Spain) ; IJCAI ; (22 : ; 2011.07.16-22 : ; Barcelona, Spain) SP - 900 EP - 905 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hofmann, Till A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Schönitz, Sebastian A1 - Niemueller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - The Carologistics RoboCup Logistics Team 2018 N2 - The Carologistics team participates in the RoboCup Logistics League for the seventh year. The RCLL requires precise vision, manipulation and path planning, as well as complex high-level decision making and multi-robot coordination. We outline our approach with an emphasis on recent modifications to those components. The team members in 2018 are David Bosen, Christoph Gollok, Mostafa Gomaa, Daniel Habering, Till Hofmann, Nicolas Limpert, Sebastian Schönitz, Morian Sonnet, Carsten Stoffels, and Tarik Viehmann. This paper is based on the last year’s team description. Y1 - 2018 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Leingartner, Max A1 - Maurer, Johannes A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - Evaluation of Sensors and Mapping Approaches for Disasters in Tunnels JF - Journal of Field Robotics N2 - Ground or aerial robots equipped with advanced sensing technologies, such as three-dimensional laser scanners and advanced mapping algorithms, are deemed useful as a supporting technology for first responders. A great deal of excellent research in the field exists, but practical applications at real disaster sites are scarce. Many projects concentrate on equipping robots with advanced capabilities, such as autonomous exploration or object manipulation. In spite of this, realistic application areas for such robots are limited to teleoperated reconnaissance or search. In this paper, we investigate how well state-of-the-art and off-the-shelf components and algorithms are suited for reconnaissance in current disaster-relief scenarios. The basic idea is to make use of some of the most common sensors and deploy some widely used algorithms in a disaster situation, and to evaluate how well the components work for these scenarios. We acquired the sensor data from two field experiments, one from a disaster-relief operation in a motorway tunnel, and one from a mapping experiment in a partly closed down motorway tunnel. Based on these data, which we make publicly available, we evaluate state-of-the-art and off-the-shelf mapping approaches. In our analysis, we integrate opinions and replies from first responders as well as from some algorithm developers on the usefulness of the data and the limitations of the deployed approaches, respectively. We discuss the lessons we learned during the two missions. These lessons are interesting for the community working in similar areas of urban search and rescue, particularly reconnaissance and search. Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/rob.21611 SN - 1556-4967 VL - 33 IS - 8 SP - 1037 EP - 1057 PB - Wiley-VCH CY - Weinheim ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Wiesen, Patrick A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Kallweit, Stephan A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - The ROSIN Project and its Outreach to South Africa JF - R&D Journal Y1 - 2019 VL - 35 SP - 1 EP - 6 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Beck, Daniel A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Design Principles of the Component-Based Robot Software Framework Fawkes JF - Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots Y1 - 2010 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 6472 ; Second International Conference, SIMPAR 2010, Darmstadt, Germany, November 15-18, 2010. Proceedings SP - 300 EP - 311 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Eckel, Gerhard A1 - Pirro, David A1 - Podbregar, Patrick A1 - Kellner, Tobias A1 - Rath, Christoph A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - Providing Ground-truth Data for the Nao Robot Platform JF - RoboCup 2010: Robot Soccer World Cup XIV Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-642-20217-9 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 6556 SP - 133 EP - 144 PB - Springer CY - Berlin 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 -