Oskar Von Stryk

Technische Universität Darmstadt | TU · Department of Computer Science (Dept.20)

While recent advances in approaches for control of humanoid robot systems show highly promising results, consideration of fully integrated humanoid systems for solving complex tasks such as disaster response has only gained focus recently. In this work, a software framework for humanoid disaster response robots is introduced. It provides newcomers...

For many applications in Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) scenarios robots need to learn a map of unknown environments. We present a system for fast online learning of occupancy grid maps requiring low computational resources. It combines a robust scan matching approach using a LIDAR system with a 3D attitude estimation system based on inertial sensi...

Collecting high-quality biomechanical measurement data for investigating human motion dynamics with muscle driven actuation, i.e., joint trajectories, ground reaction forces and muscle activities, usually requires experienced examiners, expensive measurement equipment and sophisticated processing. Several published databases offer biomechanical mea...

Biomechanics research shows that the ability of the human locomotor system depends on the functionality of a highly compliant motor system that enables a variety of different motions (such as walking and running) and control paradigms (such as flexible combination of feedforward and feedback controls strategies) and reliance on stabilizing properti...

The modeling of the time dependent, dynamic behavior of the human musculoskeletal system results in a large scale mechanical multibody system. This consists of submodels for the skeleton, wobbling masses, muscles and tendons as redundant actuators. Optimization models are required for the simulation of the muscle groups involved in a motion. In con...

We propose a real-time dynamic LiDAR odometry pipeline for mobile robots in Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) scenarios. Existing approaches to dynamic object detection often rely on pretrained learned networks or computationally expensive volumetric maps. To enhance efficiency on computationally limited robots, we reuse data between the odometry and...

While walking, ground reaction forces point from the centre of pressure to the neighbourhood of a focal point, namely the virtual pivot point (VPP), that adjusts angular momentum around the centre of mass (CoM). This study explores how age and speed affect the VPP quality and position during walking. Analysing an experimental dataset reveals high q...

Robotics researchers have been focusing on developing autonomous and human-like intelligent robots that are able to plan, navigate, manipulate objects, and interact with humans in both static and dynamic environments. These capabilities, however, are usually developed for direct interactions with people in controlled environments, and evaluated pri...

In human-human and human-robot interaction, the counterpart influences the human’s affective state. Contrary to humans, robots inherently cannot respond empathically, meaning non-beneficial affective reactions cannot be mitigated. Thus, to create a responsible and empathetic human-robot interaction (HRI), involving anthropomorphic service robots, t...

The large number and scale of natural and man-made disasters have led to an urgent demand for technologies that enhance the safety and efficiency of search and rescue teams. Semi-autonomous rescue robots are beneficial, especially when searching inaccessible terrains, or dangerous environments, such as collapsed infrastructures. For search and resc...

Earthquakes, fire, and floods often cause structural collapses of buildings. However, the inspection of such damaged buildings poses a high risk for emergency forces or is even impossible. We present three recently selected missions of the Robotics Task Force of the German Rescue Robotics Center (DRZ), where both ground and aerial robots were used...

p>A comprehensive review of the applications of the biomechanical gait models in the development of lower-limb exoskeletons.</p

p>A comprehensive review of the applications of the biomechanical gait models in the development of lower-limb exoskeletons.</p

The large number and scale of natural and man-made disasters have led to an urgent demand for technologies that enhance the safety and efficiency of search and rescue teams. Semi-autonomous rescue robots are beneficial, especially when searching inaccessible terrains, or dangerous environments, such as collapsed infrastructures. For search and resc...

Anthropomorphe Dienstleistungsroboter gewinnen immer mehr an Popularität. Je leistungsfähiger sie werden und je stärker sie in unserem Alltag integriert sind, desto wichtiger wird die verantwortungsbewusste Gestaltung der Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion (MRI). Hierbei sind Menschenwürde, Transparenz, Privatsphäre, Datenschutz und Compliance im verantwor...

Earthquakes, fire, and floods often cause structural collapses of buildings. The inspection of damaged buildings poses a high risk for emergency forces or is even impossible, though. We present three recent selected missions of the Robotics Task Force of the German Rescue Robotics Center, where both ground and aerial robots were used to explore des...

On construction sites, progress must be monitored continuously to ensure that the current state corresponds to the planned state in order to increase efficiency, safety and detect construction defects at an early stage. Autonomous mobile robots can document the state of construction with high data quality and consistency. However, finding a path th...

During teleoperation of a mobile robot, providing good operator situation awareness is a major concern as a single mistake can lead to mission failure. Camera streams are widely used for teleoperation but offer limited field-of-view. In this paper, we present a flexible framework for virtual projections to increase situation awareness based on a no...

Autonomous service robots have great potential to support humans in tasks they cannot perform due to, amongst others, time constraints, work overload, or staff shortages. An important step for such service robots to be trusted or accepted by society is the provision of transparency. Its purpose is not only to communicate what a robot is doing accor...

To meet the challenges involved in providing adequate robotic support to first responders, a holistic approach is needed. This requires close cooperation of first responders, researchers and companies for scenario-based needs analysis, iterative development of the corresponding system functionality and integrated robotic systems as well as human-ro...

During teleoperation of a mobile robot, providing good operator situation awareness is a major concern as a single mistake can lead to mission failure. Camera streams are widely used for teleoperation but offer limited field-of-view. In this paper, we present a flexible framework for virtual projections to increase situation awareness based on a no...

Since its inception in 1997, RoboCup has developed into a truly unique and long-standing research community advancing robotics and artificial intelligence through various challenges, benchmarks, and test fields. The main purposes of this article are to evaluate the research and development achievements so far and to identify new challenges and rela...

A common challenge for autonomous mobile ground robots in unstructured environments is the traversal of obstacles without risking to tip over. Previous research on prevention of vehicle tip-over is mostly limited to basic mobility systems with only few degrees of freedom (DOF). In this paper, a novel whole-body motion planning approach is presented...

Active compliant control enables to quickly and freely adjust the properties and dynamic behavior of interactions of mechanisms within certain limits. According to the emerging applications in many robotic fields and related areas, the number of publications has also strongly increased. This paper meets the need for a recent comprehensive review, i...

This book includes the post-conference proceedings of the 22nd RoboCup International Symposium, held in Montreal, QC, Canada, in June 2018. The 32 full revised papers and 11 papers from the winning teams presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 51 submissions. This book highlights the approaches of champion teams from the competitions an...

This chapter discusses the common reactive high-level behavioral control system used by Team ViGIR and Team Hector on separate robots in the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals. We present an approach that allows one or more human operators to share control authority with a high-level behavior controller in the form of a finite state machine...

Bipedal robots have gained a lot of locomotion capabilities the past few years, especially in the control level. Navigation over complex and unstructured environments using exteroceptive perception, is still an active research topic. In this paper, we present a footstep planning system to produce foothold placements, using visual perception and pro...

The application of mobile sensor-carrying vehicles for online estimating dynamic dispersion processes is extremely beneficial. Based on current estimates that depend on past measurements and forecasts obtained from a discretized PDE-model, the movement of the vehicles can be adapted resulting in measurements at more informative locations. In this w...

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are promising assets to support rescue operations in natural or man-made disasters. Most UGVs and UAVs deployed in the field today depend on human operators and reliable network connections to the vehicles. However, network connections in challenged environments are often lost, thu...

Accurate velocity estimation is an important basis for robot control, but especially challenging for highly elastically driven robots. These robots show large swing or oscillation effects if they are not damped appropriately during the performed motion. In this paper, we consider an ultra lightweight tendon driven series elastic robot arm equipped...

For estimating atmospheric dispersion of harmful material, the use of multiple sensor-equipped UAVs for information gathering offers great flexibility, but requires an efficient adaptive sampling strategy that exploits multi-vehicle cooperation. For this purpose, a novel decentralized data-driven online control scheme for cooperating vehicles in mu...

This paper proposes a human–machine-centered approach to lower limb prosthetic design. The approach is based on a profound analysis and modeling of human factors from user and expert survey data. With this knowledge, user demands are considered in the prioritization of technical requirements. To evaluate the design framework, it is applied to the e...

Online state and parameter estimation of atmospheric dispersion processes using multiple mobile sensor platforms is a prominent example of Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (DDDAS). Based on repeated predictions of a partial differential equation (PDE) model and measurements of the sensor network, estimates are updated and sensor trajectories...

Active assistive devices for lower limbs like prostheses or ortheses support the user by providing additional torque to restore and improve locomotion abilities. In order to ultimately achieve their seamless integration into the user's experience of everyday routine locomotion, they must provide a customized, familiar and predictable behavior that...

Recent improvements in virtual reality technology and head-mounted displays have led to a number of novel and innovative applications in entertainment, education, science and healthcare. The primary goal in most of these applications is to give the user a sensation of being part of the virtual reality. This focus on presence or immersion requires t...

In this paper, an approach is presented that allows a human supervisor to efficiently interact with task allocation in a multi-robot team (MRTA). The interaction is based on online modification of the setting of the employed MRTA optimization algorithm during its computation. For the example of a computationally expensive mixed-integer linear progr...

Team ViGIR and Team Hector participated in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals, held June 2015 in Pomona, California, along with 21 other teams from around the world. Both teams competed using the same high-level software, in conjunction with independently developed low-level software specific to their humanoid robots. On the basis of previou...

With increasing capabilities and reliability of autonomous mobile robots, inspection of remote industrial plants in challenging environments becomes feasible. With the ARGOS challenge, oil and gas company TOTAL S.A. initiated an international competition aimed at the development of the first autonomous mobile robot which can safely operate in compl...

Nowadays, the first steps towards the use of remote mobile robots to perform rescue tasks in disaster environments have been made possible. However, these environments still present several challenges for robots, which open new possibilities for research and development. For example, fully autonomous robots are not yet suitable for such tasks with...

The dynamic behavior of many technical and biomechanical systems can be modeled, simulated and optimized by using a multibody systems approach. Systems with many degrees of freedom typically result in complex and high-dimensional multibody systems models that necessitate capable modeling approaches and efficient computational algorithms as well as...

Bioinspired legged locomotion comprises different aspects, such as (i) benefiting from reduced complexity control approaches as observed in humans/animals, (ii) combining embodiment with the controllers and (iii) reflecting neural control mechanisms. One of the most important lessons learned from nature is the significant role of compliance in simp...

Trajectory tracking control for a tendon driven series elastically actuated robotic arm is considered. This bio-inspired actuation concept enables an ultra lightweight and highly safe robot design that is very well suited for physical human-robot interaction. However, the high elasticity in the joint actuation imposes challenges on robot control, e...

Compliant manipulation has become central torobots that are sought to safely act in and interact withunstructured as well as only partially known environments.In this paper we equip the hydraulically actuated, usuallyposition controlled arms of theAtlasrobot with model-basedjoint impedance control, including suitable damping design, andexperimental...

Powered lower limb prostheses are designed to restore the biomechanical functionality of missing parts of their users' bodies. However, they do not yet meet the versatility and efficiency of the biological counterpart. A crucial open issue is how the prosthetic system and its actuator should be designed to achieve an energy efficient operation. Thi...

One of the most important lessons learnt from more than ten years of robotic exploration in Mars is the high value of autonomy in terms of operations and science return. So far, only few full-scale experiments to foster autonomy for planetary exploration have been conducted in Europe, being the recently finished FASTER FP7 framework project one of...

Team ViGIR entered the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) with a focus on developing software to enable an operator to guide a humanoid robot through the series of challenge tasks emulating disaster response scenarios. The overarching philosophy was to make our operators full team members and not just mere supervisors. We designed our operator con...

The development of optimized motions of humanoid robots that guarantee a fast and also stable walking is an important task especially in the context of autonomous soccer playing robots in RoboCup. We present a walking motion optimization approach for the humanoid robot prototype HR18 which is equipped with a low dimensional parameterized walking tr...

In human and animal locomotion, compliant structures play an essential role in the body and actuator design. Recently, researchers have started to exploit these compliant mechanisms in robotic systems with the goal to achieve the yet superior motions and performances of the biological counterpart. For instance, compliant actuators such as series el...