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104
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
October 2014 - October 2018
January 2012 - September 2014
January 2005 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (104)
The integration of practical, laboratory‐based training in STEM education is of paramount importance. However, traditional methods may prove inadequate in addressing the evolving demands of Industry 4.0. The CrossLab project represents a transformative approach, whereby a modular, interdisciplinary, and cross‐institutional digital laboratory enviro...
The rapid technological advances of Industry 4.0 require Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) education to adapt and meet the needs of an increasingly digital workforce. However, institutions face significant obstacles in updating their lab spaces due to the significant investment of time and resources required. This article present...
Ecosystems, like almost any environmental entity, are often highly sensitive to the presence of humans when measuring field characteristics. Robotic solutions deserve attention to avoid or greatly reduce related bias. Constant availability of robotic solutions, independent of the time of day and most weather conditions, is an additional advantage....
Laboratories play an important role in university educa- tion. Digital laboratories and Cross Reality laboratories, such as remote laboratories, provide many benefits to learners compared to tradi- tional laboratories, e.g., access at any hour. However, a number of challenges arise while building and deploying these digital laborato- ries. This pap...
This study identifies a gap in data-driven approaches to robot-centric pedestrian interactions and proposes a corresponding pipeline. The pipeline utilizes unsupervised learning techniques to identify patterns in interaction data of urban environments, specifically focusing on conflict scenarios. Analyzed features include the robot's and pedestrian...
Due to the possibilities of digitalization, the world of work is undergoing a profound change towards Industry 4.0 and related Learning and Working 4.0. In this context, new competences are expected from employees, which must also be addressed in STEM disciplines, especially in higher engineering education. Lab courses are particularly suitable for...
Zusammenfassung Offene Wissenschaft in die Praxis umzusetzen, bringt für jede Fachwissenschaft und Wissenschaftler* innen Herausforderungen mit sich. Mit dem Aufkommen von Data Librarians hat sich ein neues Berufs-bild etabliert, mit dem wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken die Prozesse im Forschungsdatenmanagement umsetzen können. In diesem Beitrag werd...
The flexibility and performance of digital laboratory elements such as remote labs, VR/AR or simulations summarized under the term cross-reality labs (CrossLabs), can be seen with the development in last and has been proven under the pandemic situation. Even though the potential of cross-reality labs is obvious referring to availability and flexibi...
Unlike autonomous car applications, the operational area of urban service autonomous robots like autonomous delivery robots (ADRs) is not clearly defined at the moment. Due to large variations in the different robot designs, specific local infrastructure and regulation, assessing the feasibility of different operational scenarios is difficult. This...
Background and Context
During online learning, it is essential to provide instructional guidance to support learning. However, guidance can be given in different forms and quantities. Thus, one important challenge is to provide the right amount and type of instructional guidance.
Objective
The aim of the study is to investigate types of guidance w...
Zusammenfassung
Der Einsatz von Remote-Laboren in ingenieurwissenschaftlichen Studiengängen ermöglicht Studierenden an einigen Hochschulen die ortsunabhängige Nutzung von Laboren, Maschinen und Robotern. Remote-Labore eignen sich in besonderer Weise dafür, den digitalisierungsbedingten Anforderungen und dem Qualifikationsbedarf aus Wirtschaft und I...
Conceptual knowledge about objects is essential for humans, as well as for animals, to interact with their environment. On this basis, the objects can be understood as tools, a selection process can be implemented and their usage can be planned in order to achieve a specific goal. The conceptual knowledge, in this case, is primarily concerned about...
An important task of automated driving is to keep the vehicle in the host lane. For a robust lane estimation, the information of multiple data sources needs to be combined to overcome the drawbacks of each individual sensor [1]. For that reason, this paper proposes a new mediated perception approach towards lane keeping function. Additionally to ar...
Cooperative Systems promise increased performance by enriching environmental perception through shared data. Conversely, the entailed openness of the individual system architectures threatens their safety. Recent works focus on a run-time safety assessment to address this threat and thereby aim for high abstractions to provide general interfaces. O...
Autonomous systems will share data to enrich their environmental model and provide cooperative functionality. However, as shared data might be imprecise or inaccurate, its failure characteristics have to be analyzed by the receiving system before using the data. A corresponding failure model for describing failure characteristics was proposed by Jä...
To relieve busy urban areas of automobile traffic and exhaust emissions, bike sharing systems are increasingly being implemented. In order to expand the limited transport capacity of a bicycle, cargo bikes are used for private transport in the narrow urban area. The problem is often the availability of a cargo bike at a determined time. The limited...
Purpose
An ideal learning analytics tool for programming exercises performs the role of a lecturer who monitors the code development, provides customized support and identifies students at risk to drop out. But a reliable prediction and prevention of drop-out is difficult, due to the huge problem space in programming tasks and variety of solutions...
Tool-use applications in robotics require conceptual knowledge about objects for informed decision making and object interactions. State-of-the-art methods employ hand-crafted symbolic knowledge which is defined from a human perspective and grounded into sensory data afterwards. However, due to different sensing and acting capabilities of robots, t...
The application of (semi-)autonomous outdoor robots for delivery or transport purposes promises flexible, comfortable and cost-efficient solutions. Beside autonomous driving on an automotive level, smaller robotic systems are going to conquer footpaths and cycle tracks. The individual success of those applications depends on the geographical nature...
In computer science, dropout rates are high due to heterogeneous prior knowledge and skills. In this paper, we consider an adaptive remote laboratory as one approach to deal with this challenge at the course level. A remotely controlled laboratory gives each learner the possibility to learn at their own pace and in their individual learning space....
Robots require knowledge about objects in order to efficiently perform various household tasks involving objects. The existing knowledge bases for robots acquire symbolic knowledge about objects from manually-coded external common sense knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, Word-Net etc. The problem with such approaches is the discrepancy between hum...
When a robot is operating in a dynamic environment, it can-
not be assumed that a tool required to solve a given task will
always be available. In case of a missing tool, an ideal re-
sponse would be to find a substitute to complete the task.
In this paper, we present a proof of concept of a grounded
knowledge-based approach to tool substitution. I...
Robots require knowledge about objects in order to efficiently perform various household tasks involving objects. The existing knowledge bases for robots acquire symbolic knowledge about objects from manually-coded external common sense knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, WordNet etc. The problem with such approaches is the discrepancy between huma...
When a robot is operating in a dynamic environment, it cannot be assumed that a tool required to solve a given task will always be available. In case of a missing tool, an ideal response would be to find a substitute to complete the task. In this paper, we present a proof of concept of a grounded knowledge-based approach to tool substitution. In or...
For highly available automated driving, a robust road estimation is indispensable. In order to tackle the challenges of this task, many works employ a fusion of multiple sources, e.g., visually-detected lane markings, leading vehicle, digital maps, etc. However, each source has certain advantages and drawbacks depending on the operational scenarios...
This paper presents a framework for robust lane detection towards automated driving using multiple sensors. Since every single source (e.g., camera, digital map, etc.) can fail in certain situations, several independent sources need to be combined. Moreover, the reliability of each source strongly depends on environmental conditions, e.g., existenc...
Consider a typical task-solving scenario where a robot is performing a task involving tool use. When a robot is operating in a dynamic environment, it can not be assumed that a tool required in the task will always be available. Our research work concerns the development of a knowledge-based computation system to determine a substitute for the unav...
The advent of cooperative systems entails a dynamic composition of their components. As this contrasts current, statically composed systems, new approaches for maintaining their safety are required. In that endeavor, we propose an integration step that evaluates the failure model of shared information in relation to an application’s fault tolerance...
Smart IT has an increasing influence on the control of daily life. For instance, smart grids manage power supply, autonomous automobiles take part in traffic, and assistive robotics support humans in production cells. We denote such systems as Cyber-physical Systems (CPSs), where cyber addresses the controlling software, while physical describes th...
Autonomous grasping operations in dynamical environments are key elements of solutions for Factory-of-the-Future scenarios. The manipulator has to cope with a broad variety of objects with different shapes, materials and uncertain poses but at the same time it should provide reliable grasping and placement operations. Within this context, tactile s...
In this work, preparations for the nonparametric calibration of a 7 DOF light-weight robot using machine learning techniques are presented. The approach was developed to satisfy the requirements on absolute accuracy for robot-assisted surgery. With the kinematic and non-kinematic properties in mind, we showed that a decomposition of the robot’s kin...
Statically proving the adherence of a system to its safety requirements specified at design-time provokes overcautious systems with limited performance. Contrarily, dynamically assessing the quality of sensor observations at run-time enables adapting a system’s performance accordingly while maintaining its safety. While this could be shown by Brade...
The successes of teleoperation scenarios for mobile robots depends on a stable and reliable communication link. The environment information collected by the robot -- represented by 2D or 3D images -- has to be provided with a high resolution and a low delay to ensure a fast and precise system response. But in most realistic applications, the commun...
Automated riving is becoming the focus of various research institutions and companies. In this context, road estimation is one of the most important tasks. Many works propose to realize this task by employing one or multiple of the following orthogonal information sources: road markings from optical lane recognition, leading vehicle, digital map. e...
Autonomy is an increasing trend in manufacturing industries. Several industry-inspired robotic competitions have been established in recent years to provide testbeds of comprehensible size. In this paper, we describe a knowledge-based instrumentation and control framework used in several of these competitions. It is implemented using a rule-based p...
Manufacturing industries are changing rapidly towards more flexibility and autonomy. The RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) and RoboCup@Work tackle research questions in this domain focusing on automated reasoning and planning, and mobile manipulation respectively. However, future scenarios will require both aspects (and more) and will most likely ope...
Cyber-physical systems feature the ability to dynamically compose components in accordance to its demands. From this flexibility follows that it is unknown at design-time which system composition will be available at run-time. Since sensors inherently suffer from a lack of precision and accuracy, the lack of knowledge on this failure behavior is in...
SelectScript is an extendable, adaptable, and declarative domain-specific
language aimed at information retrieval from simulation environments and
robotic world models in an SQL-like manner. In this work we have extended the
language in two directions. First, we have implemented hierarchical queries;
second, we improve efficiency enabling manual de...
The concept of an adaptive acquisition of environment data in distributed scenarios promises a number of benefits. If an application aggregates and uses all available sensing information in an intelligent environment it may provide a higher precision and an increased fault-tolerance. Unfortunately, the application developer has to cope with a numbe...
We introduce a new declarative language called SelectScript. As its name suggests, it is a scripting language inspired primarily by SQL and its relational algebra. It is intended to be used for complex queries on different kinds of world models. Scripts can be dynamically generated and executed, or embedded into the code of foreign programming lang...
The Carolo-Cup competition conducted for the eighth time this year, is an international student competition focusing on autonomous driving scenarios implemented on 1:10 scale car models. Three practical sub-competitions have to be realized in this context and represent a complex, interdisciplinary challenge. Hence, students have to cope with all co...
We firstly investigate what types of data are present within smart environments and how they can be classified and organized. Only if the available data can be structured, it can be queried and thus put into context. This is because the variety of data and possible interpretations is tremendous, ranging from measurement values, sensor and robot des...
Driving assistance or automated driving depends to a large extent on the correct perception of the environment. Because automated driving functions have to be proven safe under all operational conditions, worst-case assumptions concerning the sensors and also the environment have to be assumed. In this paper, we propose a scheme that allows taking...
Distributed and smart environments can be seen as a distributed storage for data, information, and knowledge. Thus, one of the key challenges for future smart environments is the organization, access, and querying of this distributed storage while allowing entities to dynamically access both real-time and historical data. A relatively new approach...
The idea of “smart sensing” includes a permanent monitoring and evaluation of sensor data related to possible measurement faults. This concept requires a fault detection chain covering all relevant fault types of a specific sensor. Additionally, the fault detection components have to provide a high precision in order to generate a reliable quality...
Wireless Sensor Networks, aiming to monitor the real world's phenomena reliably, need to combine and postprocess the detected individual events. This is not possible without reliable information of the context of the individual event. One such information of very high importance is time. It enables ordering of events as well as deduction of further...
The aim of this contribution is to connect two previously separated worlds: robotic application development with the Robot Operating System (ROS) and statistical programming with R. This fruitful combination becomes apparent especially in the analysis and visualization of sensory data. We therefore introduce a new language extension for ROS that al...
Distributed sensing promises an effective exchange of sensor data among different applications. Due to multiple observations, the quality of a system output increases. However, the dynamic composition disables all off-line optimization approaches, especially for sensor-application-scheduling. Within this paper we motivate the need for an online adj...
Distributed applications dealing with data from networked sensors need some indication about the quality of remote information. This paper describes how to derive a dynamic validity value that represents a measure for the confidence in remote sensor data. In contrast to conventional systems which treats a typical processing chain as a whole, this p...
Flexible system configurations and adaptability to changing environments and environmental conditions are key concerns for autonomous systems in future applications, either in industrial production processes, building automation, or health-care scenarios. New technologies for instrumented and smart environments support the distribution and acquisit...
Distributed control applications need reliable data from remote sensors. This paper presents a method for describing the validity of continuously valued sensor data that represents the confidence an application can put in remote information. Validity is dependent on the completeness of the sensor failure model and the quality of the respective chec...
Autonomous systems have to sustain in environments of growing complexity and under dynamically changing conditions. In addition, the number and the complexity of the tasks these systems have to fulfill increases constantly. To cope with these emerging problems, we present a general concept of constructing environment models. From these models, we c...
The actual trend towards more driver assisting systems in automotive scenarios induces a need for additional sensory data from the environment. Those perceptions can be generated by the inherent sensor systems or by external transducers. However, these data may be affected by faults and uncertainties, which may not be obvious to other cars receivin...
Laser scanners are omnipresent in robotic applications. Their measurements are used in many scenarios for robust map building, localization, collision avoidance, etc. But regarding the required precise measurement and mechanical system a laser scanner is quite expensive. Hence the robotic community is looking for alternative sensors. Since 2010 a n...
Distributed sensor-actuator-systems in automotive or avionic applications have to fulfill safety requirements strictly. Those implementation has to be monitored during the development process and on run-time. For this purpose we presented a data centric fault categorization, fault representation and measurement validation concept.
In this paper we...
Adaptability to changing environments and environmental conditions is a key concern for future smart applications. Therefore, for autonomous systems it will be necessary to extend the local view on the environment with external sensors, either fixed or mobile ones. New evolving technologies support the acquisition of a myriad of information, descri...
One of the striking characteristics of mobile embedded systems is the interaction with the physical world. Prerequisite for this interaction is the reliable perception of the environment by sensors. Exploiting remote sensors of an instrumented environment and other mobile systems will extend the range and modalities of sensing and, in principle, wi...
We apply a new type of algorithm for sensor data fusion that was originally developed for estimation of business indicators. The origin of the MCMC algorithm SamPro is the consideration of uncertainty in business indicators, such as profit, sales, and cost, which results from measurement errors or forecasting. Furthermore, the SamPro algorithm uses...
The position of a mobile robot can be determined very precise today. A large number of high level sensor systems in combination with processing algorithms running on powerful hardware can provide (nearly) every requirement. But in case of limited financial and computational resources new approaches beside laser scanners and stereo cameras are neces...
In future smart environments, mobile applications will find a dynamically varying number of networked sensors that offer their measurement data. This additional information supports mobile applications in operating faster, with a higher precision and enhanced safety. The potentially increased redundancy obtained in such scenarios, however, is serio...