TY  - CHAP
A1  - Ferrein, Alexander
T1  - Robots: challenges, chances and risks for solving 21st century problems
T2  - President’s Invitation Lecture / South African Institute of Electrical Engineers : May 21 & 22, 2015, University of Johannesburg
Y1  - 2015
SP  - 1
EP  - 45
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Niemueller, Tim
A1  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Reuter, Sebastian
A1  - Jeschke, Sabina
A1  - Lakemeyer, Gerhard
T1  - The RoboCup Logistics League as a Holistic Multi-Robot Smart Factory Benchmark
T2  - Proceedings of the IROS 2015 Open forum on evaluation of results, replication of experiments and benchmarking in robotics research
N2  - With autonomous mobile robots receiving increased
attention in industrial contexts, the need for benchmarks
becomes more and more an urgent matter. The RoboCup
Logistics League (RCLL) is one specific industry-inspired scenario
focusing on production logistics within a Smart Factory.
In this paper, we describe how the RCLL allows to assess the
performance of a group of robots within the scenario as a
whole, focusing specifically on the coordination and cooperation
strategies and the methods and components to achieve them.
We report on recent efforts to analyze performance of teams in
2014 to understand the implications of the current grading
scheme, and derived criteria and metrics for performance
assessment based on Key Performance Indicators (KPI) adapted
from classic factory evaluation. We reflect on differences and
compatibility towards RoCKIn, a recent major benchmarking
European project.
Y1  - 2015
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Booysen, Tracy
A1  - Mathew, Thomas
A1  - Knox, Greig
A1  - Fong, W. K.
A1  - Stüttgen, Marcel
A1  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Steinbauer, Gerald
T1  - The Scarab Project
T2  - ICRA 2015 Developing Countries Forum
N2  - Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) is an active research
field in the robotics community. Despite recent advances
for many open research questions, these kind of systems are
not widely used in real rescue missions. One reason is that such
systems are complex and not (yet) very reliable; another is that
one has to be an robotic expert to run such a system. Moreover,
available rescue robots are very expensive and the benefits of
using them are still limited.
In this paper, we present the Scarab robot, an alternative
design for a USAR robot. The robot is light weight, humanpackable
and its primary purpose is that of extending the
rescuer’s capability to sense the disaster site. The idea is that a
responder throws the robot to a certain spot. The robot survives
the impact with the ground and relays sensor data such as
camera images or thermal images to the responder’s hand-held
control unit from which the robot can be remotely controlled.
Y1  - 2015
ER  -