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 - Hofmann, Till A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Schönitz, Sebastian A1 - Niemueller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - The Carologistics RoboCup Logistics Team 2018 N2 - The Carologistics team participates in the RoboCup Logistics League for the seventh year. The RCLL requires precise vision, manipulation and path planning, as well as complex high-level decision making and multi-robot coordination. We outline our approach with an emphasis on recent modifications to those components. The team members in 2018 are David Bosen, Christoph Gollok, Mostafa Gomaa, Daniel Habering, Till Hofmann, Nicolas Limpert, Sebastian Schönitz, Morian Sonnet, Carsten Stoffels, and Tarik Viehmann. This paper is based on the last year’s team description. Y1 - 2018 ER -