TY  - CHAP
A1  - Neumann, Tobias
A1  - Dülberg, Enno
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
A1  - Ferrein, Alexander
T1  - A rotating platform for swift acquisition of dense 3D point clouds
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  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43506-0_22
N1  - Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
VL  - 9834
SP  - 257
EP  - 268
PB  - Springer
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
A1  - Booysen, T.
A1  - Stopforth, R.
T1  - Why it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa: Experiences from German South African collaborations
JF  - International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
N2  - Robots are widely used as a vehicle to spark interest in science and technology in learners. A number of initiatives focus on this issue, for instance, the Roberta Initiative, the FIRST Lego League, the World Robot Olympiad and RoboCup Junior. Robotic competitions are valuable not only for school learners but also for university students, as the RoboCup initiative shows. Besides technical skills, the students get some project exposure and experience what it means to finish their tasks on time. But qualifying students for future high-tech areas should not only be for students from developed countries. In this article, we present our experiences with research and education in robotics within the RoboCup initiative, in Germany and South Africa; we report on our experiences with trying to get the RoboCup initiative in South Africa going. RoboCup has a huge support base of academic institutions in Germany; this is not the case in South Africa. We present our ‘north–south’ collaboration initiatives in RoboCup between Germany and South Africa and discuss some of the reasons why we think it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1729881416662789
SN  - 1729-8806
VL  - 13
IS  - 5
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
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  -