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 - 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 - 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 - http://dx.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 - 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) Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-642-25486-4 SP - 241 EP - 250 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Abstracting Away Low-Level Details in Service Robotics with Fuzzy Fluents JF - Model-Driven Knowledge Engineering for Improved Software Modularity in Robotics and Automation. Workshop at European Robotics Forum 2015 Vienna, Austria, March 11-13, 2015. Y1 - 2015 SP - 1 EP - 4 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Suder, Sebastian A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - Direct Volume Rendering in Virtual Reality T2 - Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin 2018 Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-662-56537-7 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56537-7_79 SP - 297 EP - 302 PB - Springer Vieweg CY - Berlin 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 - http://dx.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 -