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 - 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 - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - AllemaniACs@ home 2006 team description Y1 - 2006 SP - 1 EP - 6 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - A Fuzzy Set Semantics for Qualitative Fluents in the Situation Calculus / Ferrein, Alexander ; Schiffer, Stefan ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard JF - Intelligent Robotics and Applications : First International Conference, ICIRA 2008 Wuhan, China, October 15-17, 2008 Proceedings, Part I Y1 - 2008 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 5314 SP - 498 EP - 509 PB - Springer CY - Berlin 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard ED - Boots, Byron T1 - Lessons learnt from developing the embodied AI platform CAESAR for domestic service robotics T2 - Designing intelligent robots : reintegrating AI II ; papers from the AAAI spring symposium ; [held March 25 - 27, 2013 in Palo Alto, California, USA, on the campus of Stanford University]. (Technical Report / Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence ; 2013,4) Y1 - 2013 SN - 9781577356011 SP - 21 EP - 26 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 -