Students

Part 1: Kei Okada starts his first talk with a short introduction on the history of humanoid robotics research at JSK and presents various former projects such as HARP (Human Autonomous Robot Project) . He then continues to explore knowledge representation of everyday activities and knowledge-based object localization before concluding with motion imitation for robots. The compact and thorough presentation is suitable for beginners.

openEASE is a web-based Knowledge Processing Service for Robots and Robotics/AI Researchers. 

pracmln is a toolbox for statistical relational learning and reasoning and as such also includes tools for standard graphical models. pracmln is a statistical relational learning and reasoning system that supports efficient learning and inference in relational domains. pracmln has started as a fork of the ProbCog toolbox and has been extended by latest developments in learning and reasoning by the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen, Germany.

KnowRob is a knowledge processing system that combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods with techniques for acquiring knowledge and for grounding the knowledge in a physical system and can serve as a common semantic framework for integrating information from different sources. KnowRob combines static encyclopedic knowledge, common-sense knowledge, task descriptions, environment models, object information and information about observed actions that has been acquired from various sources (manually axiomatized, derived from observations, or imported from the web).

CRAM (Cognitive Robot Abstract Machine) is a software toolbox for the design, the implementation, and the deployment of cognition-enabled autonomous robots performing everyday manipulation activities. CRAM equips autonomous robots with lightweight reasoning mechanisms that can infer control decisions rather than requiring the decisions to be preprogrammed. This way CRAM-programmed autonomous robots are much more flexible, reliable, and general than control programs that lack such cognitive capabilities.

RoboSherlock is a common framework for cognitive perception, based on the principle of unstructured information management (UIM). UIM has proven itself to be a powerful paradigm for scaling intelligent information and question answering systems towards real-world complexity.

The Robohow framework represents control programs as concurrent, percept-guided manipulation plans. It will use websites, visual instructions and haptic demonstration as primary information sources. These heterogeneous pieces of information will be integrated and combined with each other through an interface layer that provides an abstract machine for programming high-level robot manipulation plans. The interpreter for this abstract machine includes novel mechanisms for optimization and constraint-based movement specification, and percept-guided manipulation.

Michael Suppa from Roboception GmbH gives useful insights into robot perception applications in real-world environments. Roboception provides 3D vision hardware and software solutions that enable industrial robotic systems to perceive their environments in real-time. His talk introduces sensing principles, confidence and errror modelling, as well as pose estimation and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). He also lists the requirements for real-world perception and manipluation systems in industrial environments.

Part 1: In the first part of his highly interesting lecture, Markus Vincze gives us useful insights into robotics visions and presents his vision of domestic robots. As an expert on 2D and 3D vision, he trains robots to understand the functions of objects and how they can help humans in everyday life situations. He shortly introduces two EU projects, HOBBIT and Squirrel, on domestic robots before diving deeper into tasks for robot vision in real-world environments (detection, grasping, placing). The lecture is suitable for beginners.

Moritz Tenorth, CTO at the start-up Magazino GmbH, talks about mobile pick-and-place robots in industrial working environments. Magazino develops and builds customized industrial robots and robot platforms mainly used in logistics that serve as robot assistants to humans, for example to factory workers to keep their work environment safe and efficient. Moritz Tenorth gives us an idea of how challenging these tasks are and how they can be solved. He also shares his advice for a successful transition from academia to industry and the work in a real startup environment.