Research Associate

Open Student Projects

Many more on request. Just write me an email!

Curriculum Vitæ

• 1982: born in Burghausen, Germany.
• 2005: B.Sc.: Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Technische Universität München
• 2007: Dipl.-Ing.: Diploma in Electrical Engineering at Technische Universität München
• 2007: Research Assistant at the Robotics and Embedded Systems Lab, Technische Universität München
• 2011: Dr. rer. nat.: Informatics, Technische Universität München
• 2011: Co-founder of Cognition Factory GmbH

Research Interests

• Computer Vision
• Visual Tracking
• Image Processing
• Cognitive Robotics

CoTeSys Projects

• JAHIR: Joint Action for Humans and Industrial Robots
• BAJA - Basic Aspects of Joint Action
• ITrackU: Image-based Tracking and Understanding

Affiliations

• Member of the Tracking Group
• Member of the Task Force: Cognitive Architectures

Videos

Task-based robot controller

Direct physical human-robot interaction has become a central part in the research field of robotics today. To use the advantages of the potential for humans and robots to work together as a team in industrial settings, the most important issues are safety for the human and an easy way to describe tasks for the robot. In the next video, we present an approach of a hierarchical structured control of industrial robots for joint-action scenarios. Multiple atomic tasks including dynamic collision avoidance, operational position, and posture can be combined in an arbitrary order respecting constraints of higher priority tasks. The controller flow is based on the theory of orthogonal projection using nullspaces and constraint least-square optimization.

Internal 3D representation

In this video one can see a visualization of the internal 3D representation used in the robotic controller to measure distances for the collision avoidance task. The 3D representation includes static and dynamic objects and is updated according to sensor data. Every sensor module can broadcast its information about the current status of unique identified objects in the workspace.

Learning a new building plan and Execution of previously learned building plans

In this videos, we show how our industrial robot is instructed via speech input and that the JAHIR robot is following and executing a collaborative plan that was teached-in previously using multiple input modalities.

Kinect enabled robot workspace surveillance

A human co-worker is tracked using a Microsoft Kinect in a human-robot collaborative scenario.

Interactive human-robot collaboration with Microsoft Kinect

In this video a human is interacting with the robotic assistive system JAHIR to jointly perform assembly t asks. The human is tracked using a Microsoft Kinect. Virtual Buttons in the menu guided interaction allow a dynamic and adaptive way of controlling and interacting with the robotic system. The overlay video on the upper right shows a close up of the working desk with the on-table projection for the buttons, the virtual environment representation and the menu.

Fusing multiple Kinects to survey shared Human-Robot-Workspaces

In today's industrial applications, robots are often strictly separated in space or time. Without surveillance of the joint workspace, a robot is unaware of unforeseen changes in its environment and can not react properly. Since robots are heavy and bulky machines, collisions may have severe consequences for the human worker. Thus, the work area must be monitored to recognize unknown obstacles in it. With the knowledge of its surroundings, the robot can be controlled to avoid collisions with any detected object. to enable direct collaboration between humans and industrial robots. Therefore, the environment is perceived by using multiple, distributed range sensors (Microsoft Kinect). The sensory data sets are decentrally pre-processed and broadcasted via the network. These data sets are then processed by additional components that segment and cluster unknown objects and publish the gained information to allow the system to react to unexpected events in the environment.

Publications