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 - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Bharatheesha, Mukunda A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Corbato, Carlos Hernandez T1 - TRROS 2018 : Teaching Robotics with ROS Workshop at ERF 2018; Proceedings of the Workshop on Teaching Robotics with ROS (held at ERF 2018), co-located with European Robotics Forum 2018 (ERF 2018), Tampere, Finland, March 15th, 2018 T2 - CEUR Workshop Proceedings Y1 - 2019 SN - 1613-0073 IS - Vol-2329 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Goeckel, Tom A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Wagner, Hermann A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - The Video Conference Tool Robot ViCToR T2 - Intelligent Robotics and Applications : 8th International Conference, ICIRA 2015, Portsmouth, UK, August 24-27, 2015, Proceedings, Part II N2 - We present a robotic tool that autonomously follows a conversation to enable remote presence in video conferencing. When humans participate in a meeting with the help of video conferencing tools, it is crucial that they are able to follow the conversation both with acoustic and visual input. To this end, we design and implement a video conferencing tool robot that uses binaural sound source localization as its main source to autonomously orient towards the currently talking speaker. To increase robustness of the acoustic cue against noise we supplement the sound localization with a source detection stage. Also, we include a simple onset detector to retain fast response times. Since we only use two microphones, we are confronted with ambiguities on whether a source is in front or behind the device. We resolve these ambiguities with the help of face detection and additional moves. We tailor the system to our target scenarios in experiments with a four minute scripted conversation. In these experiments we evaluate the influence of different system settings on the responsiveness and accuracy of the device. Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-3-319-22876-1 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22876-1_6 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 9245 SP - 61 EP - 73 PB - Springer 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 - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Kallweit, Stephan T1 - The ROSIN Education Concept - Fostering ROS Industrial-Related Robotics Education in Europe T2 - ROBOT 2017: Third Iberian Robotics Conference Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-70836-2 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70836-2_31 N1 - Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 694; (AISC, volume 694) SP - 370 EP - 381 PB - Springer CY - Cham 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 - CHAP A1 - Alhwarin, Faraj A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Scholl, Ingrid T1 - Optimized KinectFusion Algorithm for 3D Scanning Applications T2 - Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: BIOIMAGING Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-989-758-278-3 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.5220/0006594700500057 SP - 50 EP - 57 ER -