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  - Bartella, Alexander K.
A1  - Kamal, Mohammad
A1  - Scholl, Ingrid
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
A1  - Steegmann, Julius
A1  - Ketelsen, Dominik
A1  - Hölzle, Frank W.
A1  - Lethaus, Bernd
T1  - Virtual reality in preoperative imaging in maxillofacial surgery: implementation of “the next level”?
JF  - British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bjoms.2019.02.014
SN  - 0266-4356
VL  - 57
IS  - 7
SP  - 644
EP  - 648
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Limpert, Nicolas
A1  - Wiesen, Patrick
A1  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Kallweit, Stephan
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
T1  - The ROSIN Project and its Outreach to South Africa
JF  - R&D Journal
Y1  - 2019
VL  - 35
SP  - 1
EP  - 6
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Jacobs, Stefan
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
A1  - Beck, Daniel
T1  - Robust Collision Avoidance in Unknown Domestic Environments  /  Jacobs, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Schiffer, Stefan ; Beck, Daniel ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard
JF  - ROBOCUP 2009: ROBOT SOCCER WORLD CUP XIII
Y1  - 2009
N1  - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 5949
SP  - 116
EP  - 127
PB  - Springer
CY  - Berlin
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  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
A1  - Lakemeyer, Gerhard
T1  - Qualitative World Models for Soccer Robots / Schiffer, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard
JF  - Qualitative constraint calculi : application and integration ; KI 2006, 14 - 19 June 2006, Bremen, Germany ; 29th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence ; workshop / Stefan Wölfl ... (eds.)
Y1  - 2006
SN  - 3-88722-666-6
SP  - 3
EP  - 14
PB  - Univ.
CY  - Bremen
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  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
A1  - Lakemeyer, Gerhard
T1  - Football is coming Home / Schiffer, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard
JF  - PCAR '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Practical cognitive agents and robots
Y1  - 2006
SN  - 1-74052-130-7
SP  - 39
EP  - 50
PB  - ACM
CY  - New York, NY
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  - Ferrein, Alexander
A1  - Schiffer, Stefan
A1  - Lakemeyer, Gerhard
T1  - Embedding fuzzy controllers in golog  / Ferrein, Alexander ; Schiffer, Stefan ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard
JF  - IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, 2009. FUZZ-IEEE 2009
Y1  - 2009
SN  - 978-1-4244-3596-8
SP  - 894
EP  - 899
PB  - IEEE
CY  - New York
ER  -