Florian Lier

• M.Sc.
• PhD Student at Bosch

In this paper, we describe the joint effort of the Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) winning the RoboCup@Home Social Standard Platform League (@Home SSPL) at the world cup in Montreal 2018. The @Home competition consists of benchmarking tests that cover multiple skills required for service robotics and human-robot interaction in domestic environments. The @...

Mobile robots start to appear in our everyday life, e.g., in shopping malls, airports, nursing homes or warehouses. Often, these robots are operated by non-technical staff with no prior experience/education in robotics. Additionally, as with all new technology, there is certain reservedness when it comes to accepting robots in our personal space. I...

Reproducible experiments are a major requirement for transparent, comparable and verifiable results in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI). Furthermore, a version-controlled and well-structured "ready to deploy" system setup of soft- and hard-ware for an HRI experiment opens up a range of innovative possibilities for interdisciplinary effort...

Mobile robots start to appear in everyday life, e.g., in shopping malls or nursing homes. Often, they are operated by staff with no prior experience in robotics. False expectations regarding the capabilities of robots, however, may lead to disappointments and reservations when it comes to accepting robots in ones personal space. We make use of stat...

Softbank»s Pepper robot recently gained massive traction in diverse domains. On the one hand, the robot interacts with potential customers in shopping malls, stores, at trade fairs and various social events serving as a concierge or "Pepper-as-Promoter", grabbing attention and fostering customer engagement. On the other hand, the RoboCup federation...

In this paper, we describe the joint effort of the Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) which won the RoboCup@Home competition in Leipzig 2016. RoboCup@Home consists of a defined set of benchmarking tests that cover multiple skills needed by service robots. We present the robotic platforms, technical contributions, and lessons learned from previous events that...

The insufficient level of reproducibility of published experimental results has been identified as a core issue in the field of robotics in recent years. Why is that? First of all, robotics focuses on the abstract concept of computation and the creation of technological artifacts, i.e., software that implements these concepts. Hence, before actuall...

The purpose of this Wizard-of-Oz study was to explore the intuitive verbal and non-verbal goal-directed behavior of naïve participants in an intelligent robotics apartment. Participants had to complete seven mundane tasks, for instance, they were asked to turn on the light. Participants were explicitly instructed to consider nonstandard ways of com...

In recent years, an attempt is being made to control robots more intuitive and intelligible by exploiting and integrating anthropomorphic features to boost social human-robot interaction. The design and construction of anthropomorphic robots for this kind of interaction is not the only challenging issue -- smooth and expectation-matching motion con...

In this paper, we present our humanoid robot "Meka", participating in a multi party human robot dialogue scenario. Active arbitration of the robot's attention based on multi-modal stimuli is utilised to observe persons which are outside of the robots field of view. We investigate the impact of this attention management and addressee recognition on...

Research on robot systems either integrating a large number of capabilities in a single architecture or displaying outstanding performance in a single domain achieved considerable progress over the last years. Results are typically validated through experimental evaluation or demonstrated live, e.g., at robotics competitions. Common robot hardware,...

Simulation in robotics is often a love-hate relationship: while simulators do save us a lot of time and effort compared to regular deployment of complex software architectures on complex hardware, simulators are also known to evade many (if not most) of the real issues that robots need to manage when they enter the real world. Because humans are th...

Research on robot systems either integrating a large number of capabilities in a single architecture or displaying outstanding performance in a single domain achieved considerable progress over the last years. Results are typically validated through experimental evaluation or demonstrated live, e.g., at robotics competitions. While common robot har...

Research on robot systems either integrating a large number of capabilities in a single architecture or displaying outstanding performance in a single domain achieved considerable progress over the last years. Results are typically validated through experimental evaluation or demonstrated live, e.g., at robotics competitions. While common robot har...

Simulation in robotics is often a love-hate relationship: while simulators do save us a lot of time and effort compared to regular deployment of complex software architectures on complex hardware, simulators are also known to evade many (if not most) of the real issues that robots need to manage when they enter the real world. Because humans are th...

Simulated environments usually provide the most frequent test environment for robotic systems, often due to their cost and availability advantages. The crucial question is: how precisely must a simulation match the real world in order to produce realistic results? In this demonstration the humanoid robot head Flobi, as well as its simulation, will...

Autonomous robots are highly relevant targets for interaction studies, but can exhibit behavioral variability that confounds experimental validity. Currently, testing on real systems is the only means to prevent this, but remains very labour-intensive and often happens too late. To improve this situation, we are working towards early testing by mea...

In this session, we will present a continuous integration approach, using Jenkins, to validate a simulated model against a real robot. The use case comprises a 24-hour run, where the real robot and the simulation are both connected to a Jenkins instance. We will present results, best practices, plugins used and ideas to further improve the utilizat...

Robot simulators, like the MORSE project, provide a safe and readily available environment for robot system testing, reducing the effort for testing drastically. In principle, simulation testing is automatable, and thus a good target for Continuous Integration (CI)[2] testing. However, so far, high-level scenario tests still require complex compone...

For Open Science to be widely adopted, a strong institutional support for scientists will be essential. Bielefeld University and the associated Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) have developed a platform that enables researchers to manage their publications and the underlying research data in an easy and efficient way. F...

A key issue for interactive robots is smooth and natural motion. When robots are tele-operated, e.g. for tele­ presence or during "Wizard of Oz" style studies, this requires an intuitive and responsive control interface. Furthermore, this interface should not interfere with perceiving the robot's sensors. In this work we will present a system that...

A robot’s software ecosystem often comprises a set of heterogeneous software components, acquiring, exchanging, fusioning, and deriving data to trigger a desired behaviour, state, or action of the robot. Due to the nature of component based development, and component interaction respectively, an essential, and often crucial part of robotic system d...

Simulated environments often provide the first, and are usually the most frequent, test environment for robotic systems, primarily due to their cost and safety advantages. Unfortunately, changing aspects of both, the simulation and the real robot, as well as actuator control algorithms are often not taken into account when relying on simulation res...

Researchers and other knowledge workers frequently produce and use diverse research artefacts such as papers, data sets, experiment specifications, software, etc. In this, they are often faced with unclear relationships (e.g., which version of a software was in use for a particular paper), creating unnecessary work and potentially errors. Semantic...

The Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) has been founded in 2009. The RoboCup activities are embedded in a long-term research history towards human-robot interaction with laypersons in regular home envi- ronments. The RoboCup@Home competition is an important benchmark and milestone for the overall research goal. For RoboCup 2012, the team concentrates on mixe...

Founded on a vision of a human-friendly technology that adapts to users’ needs and is easy und intuitive for ordinary people to use, CITEC has established an exciting new field: Cognitive Interaction Technology. It aims to elucidate the principles and mechanisms of cognition in order to find ways of replicating them in technology and thus enable a...

Robotics is a complex and interdisciplinary research area with growing interest. Many developers with different skills and focus areas work collaboratively. In our talk we will share our experience with a continuous integration strategy and a setup based on Jenkins for the development of robotic systems. We will give an overview about the complexit...