Michael van Bekkum

• Master of Science
• Researcher at TNO

Despite ongoing digitization in industry, many companies still work with paper instructions or ‘paper-on-glass’ solutions (e.g., PDF files on screens). In recent years, various digital work instruction (DWI) technologies have become available that provide shop-floor employees with information during their activities, e.g., sequences of instructions...

We consider the problem of finding spatial configurations of multiple objects in images, e.g., a mobile inspection robot is tasked to localize abandoned tools on the floor. We define the spatial configuration of objects by first-order logic in terms of relations and attributes. A neuro-symbolic program matches the logic formulas to probabilistic ob...

Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks, e.g. to achieve autonomous navigation in unknown buildings where it has to find doors and ways to open these. I...

For effective interactions with the open world, robots should understand how interactions with known and novel objects help them towards their goal. A key aspect of this understanding lies in detecting an object's affordances, which represent the potential effects that can be achieved by manipulating the object in various ways. Our approach leverag...

This paper addresses the challenge of scaling Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to expansive 3D environments. Solving this open problem is especially relevant for robot deployment in many first-responder scenarios, such as search-and-rescue missions that cover vast spaces. The use of LMMs in these settings is currently hampered by the strict context w...

Volatility and uncertainty of today's value chains along with the market's demands for low-batch customized products mandate production systems to become smarter and more resilient, dynamically and even autonomously adapting to both external and internal disturbances. Such resilient behavior can be partially enabled by highly interconnected Cyber-P...

To develop interoperable and flexible systems, Industry 4.0 solutions need available models and standardization. There is not just a need for physical but also digital asset descriptions, which can be reused in different cases. Particularly, with newer complex system integration, there is an increase in implementations of agent-based solutions. Alt...

Making the transition to long-term interaction with social-robot systems has been identified as one of the main challenges in human-robot interaction. This article identifies four design principles to address this challenge and applies them in a real-world implementation: cloud-based robot control, a modular design, one common knowledge base for al...

The unification of statistical (data-driven) and symbolic (knowledge-driven) methods is widely recognized as one of the key challenges of modern AI. Recent years have seen a large number of publications on such hybrid neuro-symbolic AI systems. That rapidly growing literature is highly diverse, mostly empirical, and is lacking a unifying view of th...

The unification of statistical (data-driven) and symbolic (knowledge-driven) methods is widely recognised as one of the key challenges of modern AI. Recent years have seen large number of publications on such hybrid neuro-symbolic AI systems. That rapidly growing literature is highly diverse and mostly empirical, and is lacking a unifying view of t...

Detection of military assets on the ground can be performed by applying deep learning-based object detectors on drone surveillance footage. The traditional way of hiding military assets from sight is camouflage, for example by using camouflage nets. However, large assets like planes or vessels are difficult to conceal by means of traditional camouf...

Semantic graphs are a symbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique to encode domain knowledge in a formalised and algorithmic-friendly way. These graphs are generally built top-down, i.e. from domain expert knowledge or documentation in a more-or-less automated way. Semantic graphs can be used to analyse data, e.g. to perform classification or b...

Food supply chains consist of many links and operate on a global scale with many stakeholders involved from farm to fork. Each stakeholder maintains data about food products that they handle, but this data is not transparently available to all stakeholders in the chain and trust in data sharing is low. In addition, there are various other data sour...

Nowadays, manufacturers must be increasingly flexible to quickly produce a high mix of on-demand, customer-specific, low volume product types. This requires flexible assembly lines with operators that are well-supported in their constantly changing assembly task, while producing high-quality, first-time-right, zero-defect products. Information comi...

Food supply chains consist of many links and operate on a global scale with many stakeholders involved from farm to fork. Each stakeholder maintains data about food products that they handle, but this data is not transparently available to all other stakeholders in the chain due to various reasons. Trust and reciprocity for data sharing is limited...

The objective of our work was to improve healthcare services supported by eHealth applications in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by proposing interoperability that is proportional, in terms of costs and benefits, to immediate demands and is capable to enable future scenarios of growth. (e)Health represents a very complex system with many stakeholders, se...

Data standards should play an important role in achieving inter-organizational interoperability. Millions are spent on development and adoption of these standards, but does it lead to interoperability? This important question is often not addressed. In this study data interoperability in the Dutch temporary staffing industry is studied by focusing...

eGovernment interoperability should be dealt with using high-quality standards. A quality model for standards is presented based on knowledge from the software engineering domain. In the tradition of action research the model is used on the SETU standard, a standard that is mandatory in the public sector of the Netherlands in order to achieve eGove...

In order to achieve eGovernment interoperability we need high quality standards. A quality model for standards is presented based on knowledge from the software engineering domain. This model is tested on the SETU standard, a standard that is mandatory in the public sector of the Netherlands in order to achieve eGovernment interoperability. This re...

The Organisation for Electronic Transactions within the Temporary Staffing Industry (SETU, [[1]]) operates a major interoperability project concerning temporary staffing of personnel for different application areas. The hr-XML (www.hr-xml.org) standard is applied to the Dutch situation. Several UML (Unified Modeling Language) class diagrams represe...

This paper will discuss strategies for using international domain standards within a national context. The various strategies are illustrated by means of a case study of the temporary staffing industry.