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 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - Decision-Theoretic Planning with Linguistic Terms in Golog T2 - FLinAl 2015 - Fuzzy Logic in Artificial Intelligence : Proceedings of the Workshop on Fuzzy Logic in AI (FLinAI-15) co-located with the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015) Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 25, 2015. Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0074-1424-4 SN - 1613-0073 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 - CHAP A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - A Local Planner for Ackermann-Driven Vehicles in ROS SBPL T2 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa and Robotics and Mechatronics (PRASA-RobMech), 2015 Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RoboMech.2015.7359518 SP - 172 EP - 177 ER - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - TY - CHAP A1 - Hofmann, Till A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Constraint-based online transformation of abstract plans into executable robot actions T2 - Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI Spring Symposium on Integrating Representation, Reasoning, Learning, and Execution for Goal Directed Autonomy Y1 - 2018 SP - 549 EP - 553 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 - 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 - CHAP A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander ED - Steinbauer, Gerald ED - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - golog++ : An integrative system design T2 - CogRob 2018. Cognitive Robotics Workshop : Proceedings of the 11th Cognitive Robotics Workshop 2018 co-located with 16th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2018) Tempe, AZ, USA, October 27th, 2018 Y1 - 2019 SN - 1613-0073 SP - 29 EP - 35 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Neumann, Tobias A1 - Krückel, Kai A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - A system for continuous underground site mapping and exploration Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85859 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 - Alhwarin, Faraj A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Scholl, Ingrid T1 - An Optimized Method for 3D Body Scanning Applications Based on KinectFusion T2 - Communications in Computer and Information Science Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29196-9_6 SN - 1865-0929 N1 - 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2018; Funchal; Portugal; 19 January 2018 through 21 January 2018 VL - 1024 SP - 100 EP - 113 PB - Springer ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Eltester, Niklas Sebastian A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - A smart factory setup based on the RoboCup logistics league T2 - 2020 IEEE Conference on Industrial Cyberphysical Systems (ICPS) N2 - In this paper we present SMART-FACTORY, a setup for a research and teaching facility in industrial robotics that is based on the RoboCup Logistics League. It is driven by the need for developing and applying solutions for digital production. Digitization receives constantly increasing attention in many areas, especially in industry. The common theme is to make things smart by using intelligent computer technology. Especially in the last decade there have been many attempts to improve existing processes in factories, for example, in production logistics, also with deploying cyber-physical systems. An initiative that explores challenges and opportunities for robots in such a setting is the RoboCup Logistics League. Since its foundation in 2012 it is an international effort for research and education in an intra-warehouse logistics scenario. During seven years of competition a lot of knowledge and experience regarding autonomous robots was gained. This knowledge and experience shall provide the basis for further research in challenges of future production. The focus of our SMART-FACTORY is to create a stimulating environment for research on logistics robotics, for teaching activities in computer science and electrical engineering programmes as well as for industrial users to study and explore the feasibility of future technologies. Building on a very successful history in the RoboCup Logistics League we aim to provide stakeholders with a dedicated facility oriented at their individual needs. Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICPS48405.2020.9274766 N1 - 2020 IEEE Conference on Industrial Cyberphysical Systems (ICPS), 10-12 June 2020, Tampere, Finland. SP - 297 EP - 302 PB - IEEE ER -