TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - 20 Years of RoboCup - A Subjective Retrospection JF - KI - Künstliche Intelligenz N2 - This summer, RoboCup competitions were held for the 20th time in Leipzig, Germany. It was the second time that RoboCup took place in Germany, 10 years after the 2006 RoboCup in Bremen. In this article, we give an overview on the latest developments of RoboCup and what happened in the different leagues over the last decade. With its 20th edition, RoboCup clearly is a success story and a role model for robotics competitions. From our personal view point, we acknowledge this by giving a retrospection about what makes RoboCup such a success. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-016-0449-5 SN - 1610-1987 VL - 30 IS - 3 SP - 225 EP - 232 PB - Springer CY - Berlin 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 - https://doi.org/10.1002/rob.21611 SN - 1556-4967 VL - 33 IS - 8 SP - 1037 EP - 1057 PB - Wiley-VCH CY - Weinheim 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 - CHAP A1 - Stopforth, Riaan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - Europe and South African collaboration on the Mechatronics and Robotics systems as part of the SA Robotics Center T2 - ICRA 2015 Developing Countries Forum N2 - Mechatronics consist of the integration of mechanical engineering, electronic integration and computer science/ engineering. These broad fields are essential for robotic systems, yet it makes it difficult for the researchers to specialize and be experts in all these fields. Collaboration between researchers allow for the integration of experience and specialization, to allow optimized systems. Collaboration between the European countries and South Africa is critical, as each country has different resources available, which the other countries might not have. Applications with the need for approval of any restrictions, can also be obtained easier in some countries compared to others, thus preventing the delays of research. Some problems that have been experienced are discussed, with the Robotics Center of South Africa as a possible solution. Y1 - 2015 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Zug, Sebastian A1 - Niemueller, Tim A1 - Hochgeschwender, Nico A1 - Seidensticker, Kai A1 - Seidel, Martin A1 - Friedrich, Tim A1 - Neumann, Tobias A1 - Karras, Ulrich A1 - Kraetzschmar, Gerhard K. A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - An Integration Challenge to Bridge the Gap Among Industry-Inspired RoboCup Leagues T2 - RoboCup 2016: Robot World Cup XX. RoboCup 2016. Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-3-319-68792-6 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68792-6_13 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNCS, Vol 9776 SP - 157 EP - 168 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Stopforth, Riaan A1 - Davrajh, Shaniel A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - South African robotics entity for a collaboration initiative T2 - Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa and Robotics and Mechatronics International Conference (PRASA-RobMech), 2016 Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5090-3335-5 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/RoboMech.2016.7813144 N1 - PRASA-RobMech, Nov. 30 2016-Dec. 2 2016, Stellenbosch, South Africa SP - 1 EP - 6 PB - IEEE ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Neumann, Tobias A1 - Krückel, Kai A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - A system for continuous underground site mapping and exploration Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85859 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander ED - Steinbauer, Gerald ED - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - golog++ : An integrative system design T2 - CogRob 2018. Cognitive Robotics Workshop : Proceedings of the 11th Cognitive Robotics Workshop 2018 co-located with 16th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2018) Tempe, AZ, USA, October 27th, 2018 Y1 - 2019 SN - 1613-0073 SP - 29 EP - 35 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schulte-Tigges, Joschua A1 - Förster, Marco A1 - Nikolovski, Gjorgji A1 - Reke, Michael A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Kaszner, Daniel A1 - Matheis, Dominik A1 - Walter, Thomas T1 - Benchmarking of various LiDAR sensors for use in self-driving vehicles in real-world environments JF - Sensors N2 - Abstract In this paper, we report on our benchmark results of the LiDAR sensors Livox Horizon, Robosense M1, Blickfeld Cube, Blickfeld Cube Range, Velodyne Velarray H800, and Innoviz Pro. The idea was to test the sensors in different typical scenarios that were defined with real-world use cases in mind, in order to find a sensor that meet the requirements of self-driving vehicles. For this, we defined static and dynamic benchmark scenarios. In the static scenarios, both LiDAR and the detection target do not move during the measurement. In dynamic scenarios, the LiDAR sensor was mounted on the vehicle which was driving toward the detection target. We tested all mentioned LiDAR sensors in both scenarios, show the results regarding the detection accuracy of the targets, and discuss their usefulness for deployment in self-driving cars. KW - Lidar KW - Benchmark KW - Self-driving Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/s22197146 SN - 1424-8220 N1 - This article belongs to the Special Issue "Sensor Fusion for Vehicles Navigation and Robotic Systems" VL - 22 IS - 19 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Kallweit, Stephan A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Reichert, Walter T1 - Learning to Program Mobile Robots in the ROS Summer School Series T2 - Proceedings 6th International Conference on Robotics in Education (RiE 15) N2 - The main objective of our ROS Summer School series is to introduce MA level students to program mobile robots with the Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is a robot middleware that is used my many research institutions world-wide. Therefore, many state-of-the-art algorithms of mobile robotics are available in ROS and can be deployed very easily. As a basic robot platform we deploy a 1/10 RC cart that is wquipped with an Arduino micro-controller to control the servo motors, and an embedded PC that runs ROS. In two weeks, participants get to learn the basics of mobile robotics hands-on. We describe our teaching concepts and our curriculum and report on the learning success of our students. Y1 - 2015 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Alhwarin, Faraj A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Gebhardt, Andreas A1 - Kallweit, Stephan A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Tedjasukmana, Osmond Sanjaya T1 - Improving additive manufacturing by image processing and robotic milling T2 - 2015 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), Aug 24-28, 2015 Gothenburg, Sweden Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/CoASE.2015.7294217 SP - 924 EP - 929 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Kirsch, Maximilian A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - Integrating golog++ and ROS for Practical and Portable High-level Control T2 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2 N2 - The field of Cognitive Robotics aims at intelligent decision making of autonomous robots. It has matured over the last 25 or so years quite a bit. That is, a number of high-level control languages and architectures have emerged from the field. One concern in this regard is the action language GOLOG. GOLOG has been used in a rather large number of applications as a high-level control language ranging from intelligent service robots to soccer robots. For the lower level robot software, the Robot Operating System (ROS) has been around for more than a decade now and it has developed into the standard middleware for robot applications. ROS provides a large number of packages for standard tasks in robotics like localisation, navigation, and object recognition. Interestingly enough, only little work within ROS has gone into the high-level control of robots. In this paper, we describe our approach to marry the GOLOG action language with ROS. In particular, we present our architecture on inte grating golog++, which is based on the GOLOG dialect Readylog, with the Robot Operating System. With an example application on the Pepper service robot, we show how primitive actions can be easily mapped to the ROS ActionLib framework and present our control architecture in detail. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5220/0008984406920699 N1 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence: ICAART 2020, Valletta, Malta SP - 692 EP - 699 PB - SciTePress CY - Setúbal, Portugal ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Walenta, Robert A1 - Schellekens, Twan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - A decentralised system approach for controlling AGVs with ROS T2 - AFRICON, Proceedings Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5386-2775-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2017.8095693 SN - 2153-0033 N1 - AFRICON <2017, 18-20 Sept., Cape Town, South Africa> SP - 1436 EP - 1441 PB - IEEE ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Niemueller, Tim A1 - Reuter, Sebastian A1 - Ferrein, Alexander ED - Almeida, Luis T1 - Fawkes for the RoboCup Logistics League T2 - RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-3-319-29339-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29339-4_31 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 9513 SP - 365 EP - 373 PB - Springer International Publishing CY - Cham 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 - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - Looking back on 20 Years of RoboCup JF - KI - Künstliche Intelligenz Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://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 - CHAP A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - A Local Planner for Ackermann-Driven Vehicles in ROS SBPL T2 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa and Robotics and Mechatronics (PRASA-RobMech), 2015 Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/RoboMech.2015.7359518 SP - 172 EP - 177 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Maier, Christopher A1 - Mühlbacher, Clemens A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - Vassos, Stravros T1 - Controlling logistics robots with the action-based language YAGI T2 - Intelligent Robotics and Applications: 9th International Conference, ICIRA 2016, Tokyo, Japan, August 22-24, 2016, Proceedings, Part I Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-3-319-43505-3 (Print) SN - 978-3-319-43506-0 (Online) U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43506-0_46 N1 - Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) VL - 9834 SP - 525 EP - 537 PB - Springer 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 - Eichenbaum, Julian A1 - Nikolovski, Gjorgji A1 - Mülhens, Leon A1 - Reke, Michael A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Scholl, Ingrid T1 - Towards a lifelong mapping approach using Lanelet 2 for autonomous open-pit mine operations T2 - 2023 IEEE 19th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) N2 - Autonomous agents require rich environment models for fulfilling their missions. High-definition maps are a well-established map format which allows for representing semantic information besides the usual geometric information of the environment. These are, for instance, road shapes, road markings, traffic signs or barriers. The geometric resolution of HD maps can be as precise as of centimetre level. In this paper, we report on our approach of using HD maps as a map representation for autonomous load-haul-dump vehicles in open-pit mining operations. As the mine undergoes constant change, we also need to constantly update the map. Therefore, we follow a lifelong mapping approach for updating the HD maps based on camera-based object detection and GPS data. We show our mapping algorithm based on the Lanelet 2 map format and show our integration with the navigation stack of the Robot Operating System. We present experimental results on our lifelong mapping approach from a real open-pit mine. Y1 - 2023 SN - 979-8-3503-2069-5 (Online) SN - 979-8-3503-2070-1 (Print) U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/CASE56687.2023.10260526 N1 - 19th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 26-30 August 2023, Auckland, New Zealand. PB - IEEE ER -