19 accepted papers
Many automated manufacturing processes rely on industrial robot arms to move process-specific tools along workpiece surfaces. In applications like grinding, sanding, spray painting, or inspection, they need to cover a workpiece fully while keeping their tools perpendicular to its surface. While ther…
Mobile robots can perform increasingly impressive feats in controlled environments. Many real applications, though, especially for walking robots, introduce a high degree of unforeseen difficulties, yet require very robust robot operation. In these cases, it is still often not possible to guarantee
Few-shot object detection is especially interesting for applications with mobile robots and becomes even more challenging when task-related classes are very similar. This work focuses on such a scenario: detecting different types of household and industrial tools. Such tools can be rare and specific
The use of mobile robots has become increasingly common in multiple areas of daily life. To increase their autonomy for performing various tasks, efficient navigation skills are essential. The most crucial component of such navigation is the ability to calculate a global path between two points. The…
Deciding where to go next is a challenging task for humans. However, for robots in unknown environments, this becomes even more demanding. In planetary explorations, the robots are continuously challenged with the task of exploring novel areas, yet so far, humans decide for the robots where to go. E…
While individual robots are becoming increasingly capable, the complexity of expected missions increases exponentially in comparison. To cope with this complexity, heterogeneous teams of robots have become a significant research interest in recent years. Making effective use of the robots and their…
As intelligent systems become increasingly important in our daily lives, new ways of interaction are needed. Classical user interfaces pose issues for the physically impaired and are partially not practical or convenient. Gesture recognition is an alternative, but often not reactive enough when conv…
Autonomous Mobile Robots are used with increasing frequency in inspection and maintenance tasks completing fixed goal sequences. The downtime robots experience between goals offers an opportunity to gather additional environment information instead of resting. Uncertainty in the amount of downtime a…
Motion planning for mobile robot platforms is one of the long-established research fields in robotics. In this paper, we propose a trajectory planner for mobile holonomic robots to steer non-holonomic conventional passive wheelchairs in dynamic environments. The challenges to overcome when steering…
Exploring unknown environments, such as caves or planetary surfaces, requires a quick understanding of the surroundings. Beforehand, only aerial footage from satellites or images from previous missions might be available. The proposed ensemble based anomaly detection framework utilizes previously ga…
We present a biologically inspired approach for path planning with dynamic obstacle avoidance. Path plan-ning is performed in a condensed configuration space of a robot generated by self-organizing neural networks (SONN). The robot itself and static as well as dynamic obstacles are mapped from the C
Complex robots in challenging scenarios require constant monitoring of their state and adaptation of their behavior to ensure robustness, reliability and longevity. While known possible errors can be specifically surveilled, other prob-lems can be fully unforeseen, requiring detection systems able t…
Evolution gave humans advanced grasping capabilities combining an adaptive hand with efficient control. Grasping motions can quickly be adapted if the object moves or deforms. Soft-grasping with an anthropomorphic hand is a great capability for robots interacting with objects shaped for humans. Neve
Bio-inspired robots take advantage of millions of years of evolution to provide interesting and flexible solutions for issues related to motion and perception. Often, they have challenging kinematics classical robotics control mechanisms are not always able to take advantage of them. A concrete exam…
Robotic automation is a key driver for the advancement of technology. The skills of human workers, however, are difficult to program and seem currently unmatched by technical systems. In this work we present a data-driven approach to extract and learn robot-independent contact skills from human demo…
Compliant end effectors in robotics are an important prerequisite for the field of object manipulation and environment interactions. However, current manipulators are usually stiff position-controlled systems, generating the need to add compliance. In this work, we present Forward Dynamics Complianc…
We present an approach for recognizing indoor scenes in object constellations that require object search by a mobile robot, as they cannot be captured from a single viewpoint. In our approach that we call Active Scene Recognition (ASR), robots predict object poses from learnt spatial relations that…
We present an approach that uses combinatorial optimization to decide which spatial relations between objects are relevant to accurately describe an indoor scene, made up of objects. We extract scene models from object configurations that are acquired during demonstration of actions, characteristic…
New sensor systems, efficient planning algorithms and increased computational power have led to a growing interest in high-resolution 3-D data for challenging applications like mobile manipulation, 3-D mapping and object recognition. 3-D laser scanners built using a rotating or swivelling 2-D laser…