TY - CHAP A1 - Leingartner, Max A1 - Maurer, Johannes A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Evaluation of sensors and mapping approaches for disasters in tunnels T2 - IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics : SSRR : 21-26 Oct. 2013, Linkoping, Sweden Y1 - 2013 SN - 978-1-4799-0879-0 SP - 1 EP - 7 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Ewert, Daniel A1 - Reuter, Sebastian A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Jeschke, Sabina A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - The Carologistics RoboCup Logistics Team 2013 T2 - RoboCup 2013 : Eindhoven Y1 - 2013 SP - 1 EP - 8 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 - 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 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3558-7_18 SP - 225 EP - 236 PB - Springer CY - New York, NY ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Meyer, Thomas T1 - A Brief Overview of Artificial Intelligence in South Africa JF - AI Magazine N2 - South Africa in recent years is the establishment of a number of research hubs involved in AI activities ranging from mobile robotics and computational intelligence, to knowledge representation and reasoning, and human language technologies. In this survey we take the reader through a quick tour of the research being conducted at these hubs, and touch on an initiative to maintain and extend the current level of interest in AI research in the country. Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v33i1.2357 SN - 0738-4602 VL - 33 IS - 1 SP - 99 EP - 101 PB - AAAI CY - Menlo Park ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Kallweit, Stephan A1 - Lautermann, Mark T1 - Towards an autonomous pilot system for a tunnel boring machine T2 - 5th Robotics and Mechatronics Conference of South Africa (ROBMECH) : 26 - 27 November 2012 ; CSIR International Conference Centre Gauteng South Africa Y1 - 2012 SN - 978-1-4673-5183-6 N1 - Robotics and Mechatronics Conference of South Africa <5, 2012, Johannesburg> ; ROBOMECH <5, 2012, Johannesburg> PB - IEEE CY - Piscataway, NJ 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 - https://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 - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald A1 - Vassos, Stavros T1 - Action-Based Imperative Programming with YAGI JF - AAAI Technical Report 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, Papers from the 2012 AAAI Workshop, CogRob@AAAI 2012, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 22-23, 2012 SP - 24 EP - 31 PB - AAAI CY - Menlo Park ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Marais, Stephen A1 - Potgieter, Anet A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - RoboCup Junior: A vehicle for S&T education in Africa? Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-1-61284-992-8 N1 - AFRICON, 2011 SP - 1 EP - 6 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Booysen, Tracy A1 - Rieger, Michael A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Towards inexpensive robots for science & technology teaching and education in Africa Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-1-61284-992-8 N1 - AFRICON, 2011 SP - 1 EP - 6 PB - IEEE CY - New York 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 - 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 - 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 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Rens, Gavin A1 - Meyer, Thomas A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - A Logic for Specifying Partially Observable Stochastic Domains JF - Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop pn non-Monotonic Reasoning, Action and Change (NRAC`11) Y1 - 2011 N1 - Technical Report RMIT-TR-11-02 SP - 15 EP - 22 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) N2 - In the RoboCup@Home domestic service robot competition, complex tasks such as "get the cup from the kitchen and bring it to the living room" or "find me this and that object in the apartment" have to be accomplished. At these competitions the robots may only be instructed by natural language. As humans use qualitative concepts such as "near" or "far", the robot needs to cope with them, too. For our domestic robot, we use the robot programming and plan language Readylog, our variant of Golog. In previous work we extended the action language Golog, which was developed for the high-level control of agents and robots, with fuzzy concepts and showed how to embed fuzzy controllers in Golog. In this paper, we demonstrate how these notions can be fruitfully applied to two domestic service robotic scenarios. In the first application, we demonstrate how qualitative fluents based on a fuzzy set semantics can be deployed. In the second program, we show an example of a fuzzy controller for a follow-a-person task. Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-642-25486-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25489-5_24 SP - 241 EP - 250 PB - ACM CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - Team Zadeat 2010 : application for participation Y1 - 2010 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - golog.lua: Towards a non-prolog implementation of Golog for embedded systems T2 - Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 10081 N2 - Among many approaches to address the high-level decision making problem for autonomous robots and agents, the robot program¬ming and plan language Golog follows a logic-based deliberative approach, and its successors were successfully deployed in a number of robotics applications over the past ten years. Usually, Golog interpreter are implemented in Prolog, which is not available for our target plat¬form, the bi-ped robot platform Nao. In this paper we sketch our first approach towards a prototype implementation of a Golog interpreter in the scripting language Lua. With the example of the elevator domain we discuss how the basic action theory is specified and how we implemented fluent regression in Lua. One possible advantage of the availability of a Non-Prolog implementation of Golog could be that Golog becomes avail¬able on a larger number of platforms, and also becomes more attractive for roboticists outside the Cognitive Robotics community. Y1 - 2010 U6 - https://doi.org/10.4230/DagSemProc.10081.9 N1 - Dagstuhl Seminar 10081 "Cognitive Robotics", 21.02. to 26.02.2010, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics, Wadern, DE SP - 1 EP - 15 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Beck, Daniel A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Design principles of the component-based robot software framework Fawkes T2 - Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots N2 - The idea of component-based software engineering was proposed more that 40 years ago, yet only few robotics software frameworks follow these ideas. The main problem with robotics software usually is that it runs on a particular platform and transferring source code to another platform is crucial. In this paper, we present our software framework Fawkes which follows the component-based software design paradigm by featuring a clear component concept with well-defined communication interfaces. We deployed Fawkes on several different robot platforms ranging from service robots to biped soccer robots. Following the component concept with clearly defined communication interfaces shows great benefit when porting robot software from one robot to the other. Fawkes comes with a number of useful plugins for tasks like timing, logging, data visualization, software configuration, and even high-level decision making. These make it particularly easy to create and to debug productive code, shortening the typical development cycle for robot software. Y1 - 2010 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17319-6_29 N1 - Second International Conference, SIMPAR 2010, Darmstadt, Germany, November 15-18, 2010 SP - 300 EP - 311 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - A Lua-based behavior engine for controlling the humanoid robot Nao T2 - RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII N2 - The high-level decision making process of an autonomous robot can be seen as an hierarchically organised entity, where strategical decisions are made on the topmost layer, while the bottom layer serves as driver for the hardware. In between is a layer with monitoring and reporting functionality. In this paper we propose a behaviour engine for this middle layer which, based on formalism of hybrid state machines (HSMs), bridges the gap between high-level strategic decision making and low-level actuator control. The behaviour engine has to execute and monitor behaviours and reports status information back to the higher level. To be able to call the behaviours or skills hierarchically, we extend the model of HSMs with dependencies and sub-skills. These Skill-HSMs are implemented in the lightweight but expressive Lua scripting language which is well-suited to implement the behaviour engine on our target platform, the humanoid robot Nao. Y1 - 2010 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11876-0_21 N1 - 13th RoboCup International Symposium, Graz, Austria, June/July, 2009 SP - 240 EP - 251 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Steinbauer, Gerald T1 - On the Way to High-Level Programming for Resource-Limited Embedded Systems with Golog T2 - Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots N2 - In order to allow an autonomous robot to perform non-trivial tasks like to explore a foreign planet the robot has to have deliberative capabilities like reasoning or planning. Logic-based approaches like the programming and planing language Golog and it successors has been successfully used for such decision-making problems. A drawback of this particular programing language is that their interpreter usually are written in Prolog and run on a Prolog back-end. Such back-ends are usually not available or feasible on resource-limited robot systems. In this paper we present our ideas and first results of a re-implementation of the interpreter based on the Lua scripting language which is available on a wide range of systems including small embedded systems. Y1 - 2010 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17319-6_23 N1 - Second International Conference, SIMPAR 2010, Darmstadt, Germany, November 15-18, 2010 SP - 229 EP - 240 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER -