Publications

  1. Thomas Weber, Sergey Triputen, Michael Danner, Sascha Braun, Kristiaan Schreve, and Matthias Rätsch. Follow me: Real-time in the wild person tracking application for autonomous robotics. In Hidehisa Akiyama, Oliver Obst, Claude Sammut, and Flavio Tonidandel, editors, RoboCup 2017: Robot World Cup XXI, pages 156–167, Cham, 2018. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In the last 20 years there have been major advances in autonomous robotics. In IoT (Industry 4.0), mobile robots require more intuitive interaction possibilities with humans in order to expand its field of applications. This paper describes a user-friendly setup, which enables a person to lead the robot in an unknown environment. The environment has to be perceived by means of sensory input. For realizing a cost and resource efficient Follow Me application we use a single monocular camera as low-cost sensor. For efficient scaling of our Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm, we integrate an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor. With the camera input we detect and track a person. We propose combining state of the art deep learning with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and SLAM algorithms functionality on the same input camera image. Based on the output robot navigation is possible. This work presents the specification, workflow for an efficient development of the Follow Me application. Our application’s delivered point clouds are also used for surface construction. For demonstration, we use our platform SCITOS G5 equipped with the afore mentioned sensors. Preliminary tests show the system works robustly in the wild (This work is partially supported by a grant of the BMBF FHprofUnt program, no. 03FH049PX5).

  2. Santosh Thoduka, Frederik Hegger, Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar, and Paul G. Plöger. Motion detection in the presence of egomotion using the fourier-mellin transform. In Hidehisa Akiyama, Oliver Obst, Claude Sammut, and Flavio Tonidandel, editors, RoboCup 2017: Robot World Cup XXI, pages 252–264, Cham, 2018. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Vision-based motion detection, an important skill for an autonomous mobile robot operating in dynamic environments, is particularly challenging when the robot’s camera is in motion. In this paper, we use a Fourier-Mellin transform-based image registration method to compensate for camera motion before applying temporal differencing for motion detection. The approach is evaluated online as well as offline on a set of sequences recorded with a Care-O-bot 3, and compared with a feature-based method for image registration. In comparison to the feature-based method, our method performs better both in terms of robustness of the registration and the false discovery rate.

  3. Luz María Martínez and Javier Ruiz-del Solar. Recognition of grasp points for clothes manipulation under unconstrained conditions. In Hidehisa Akiyama, Oliver Obst, Claude Sammut, and Flavio Tonidandel, editors, RoboCup 2017: Robot World Cup XXI, pages 350–362, Cham, 2018. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In this work a system for recognizing grasp points in RGB-D images is proposed. This system is intended to be used by a domestic robot when deploying clothes lying at a random position on a table. By taking into consideration that the grasp points are usually near key parts of clothing, such as the waist of pants or the neck of a shirt. The proposed system attempts to detect these key parts first, using a local multivariate contour that adapts its shape accordingly. Then, the proposed system applies the Vessel Enhancement filter to identify wrinkles in the clothes, allowing to compute a roughness index for the clothes. Finally, by mixing (i) the key part contours and (ii) the roughness information obtained by the vessel filter, the system is able to recognize grasp points for unfolding a piece of clothing. The recognition system is validated using realistic RGB-D images of different cloth types.

  4. Raphael Memmesheimer, Vikor Seib, and Dietrich Paulus. homer@unikoblenz: Winning team of the robocup@home open platform league 2017. In Hidehisa Akiyama, Oliver Obst, Claude Sammut, and Flavio Tonidandel, editors, RoboCup 2017: Robot World Cup XXI, pages 509–520, Cham, 2018. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper we present the approaches that we used for this year’s RoboCup@Home participation in the Open Platform League. A special focus was put on team collaboration by handing over objects between two robots of different teams that were not connected by network. The robots communicated using natural language (speech synthesis, speech recognition), a typical human-robot “interface” that was adapted to robot-robot interaction. Furthermore, we integrated new approaches for online tracking and learning of an operator, have shown a novel approach for teaching a robot new commands by describing them using natural language and a set of previously known commands. Parameters of these commands are still interchangeable. Finally, we integrated deep neural networks for person detection and recognition, human pose estimation, gender classification and object recognition.

  5. Tetsunari Inamura and Yoshiaki Mizuchi. Competition design to evaluate cognitive functions in human-robot interaction based on immersive vr. In Hidehisa Akiyama, Oliver Obst, Claude Sammut, and Flavio Tonidandel, editors, RoboCup 2017: Robot World Cup XXI, pages 84–94, Cham, 2018. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    While RoboCup Soccer and RoboCup Rescue have simulation leagues, RoboCup@Home does not. One reason for the difficulty of creating a RoboCup@Home simulation is that robot users must be present. Almost all existing tasks in RoboCup@Home depend on communication between humans and robots. For human-robot interaction in a simulator, a user model or avatar should be designed and implemented. Furthermore, behavior of real humans often lead to unfair conditions between participant teams. Since the one-shot trial is the standard evaluation style in the current RoboCup, human behavior is quite difficult to evaluate from a statistical point of view. We propose a novel software platform for statistically evaluating human-robot interaction in competitions. With the help of cloud computing and an immersive VR system, cognitive and social human-robot interaction can be carried out and measured as objective data in a VR environment. In this paper, we explain the novel platform and propose two kinds of competition design with the aim of evaluating social and cognitive human-robot interaction from a statistical point of view.

  6. Alexander Hagg, Frederik Hegger, and Paul G. Plöger. On recognizing transparent objects in domestic environments using fusion of multiple sensor modalities. In Sven Behnke, Raymond Sheh, Sanem Sariel, and Daniel D. Lee, editors, RoboCup 2016: Robot World Cup XX, pages 3–15, Cham, 2017. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Current object recognition methods fail on object sets that include both diffuse, reflective and transparent materials, although they are very common in domestic scenarios. We show that a combination of cues from multiple sensor modalities, including specular reflectance and unavailable depth information, allows us to capture a larger subset of household objects by extending a state of the art object recognition method. This leads to a significant increase in robustness of recognition over a larger set of commonly used objects.

  7. Pedro U. Lima, Daniele Nardi, Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar, Rainer Bischoff, and Matteo Matteucci. Rockin and the european robotics league: Building on robocup best practices to promote robot competitions in europe. In Sven Behnke, Raymond Sheh, Sanem Sariel, and Daniel D. Lee, editors, RoboCup 2016: Robot World Cup XX, pages 181–192, Cham, 2017. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    This paper describes activities that promote robot competitions in Europe, using and expanding RoboCup concepts and best practices, through two projects funded by the European Commission under its FP7 and Horizon2020 programmes. The RoCKIn project ended in December 2015 and its goal was to speed up the progress towards smarter robots through scientific competitions. Two challenges have been selected for the competitions due to their high relevance and impact on Europes societal and industrial needs: domestic service robots (RoCKIn@Home) and innovative robot applications in industry (RoCKIn@Work). RoCKIn extended the corresponding RoboCup leagues by introducing new and prevailing research topics, such as networking mobile robots with sensors and actuators spread over the environment, in addition to specifying objective scoring and benchmark criteria and methods to assess progress. The European Robotics League (ERL) started recently and includes indoor competitions related to domestic and industrial robots, extending RoCKIn’s rulebooks. Teams participating in the ERL must compete in at least two tournaments per year, which can take place either in a certified test bed (i.e., based on the rulebooks) located in a European laboratory, or as part of a major robot competition event. The scores accumulated by the teams in their best two participations are used to rank them over an year.

  8. S. Hamidreza Kasaei, Nima Shafii, Luís Seabra Lopes, and Ana Maria Tomé. Object learning and grasping capabilities for robotic home assistants. In Sven Behnke, Raymond Sheh, Sanem Sariel, and Daniel D. Lee, editors, RoboCup 2016: Robot World Cup XX, pages 279–293, Cham, 2017. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    This paper proposes an architecture designed to create a proper coupling between perception and manipulation for assistive robots. This is necessary for assistive robots, not only to perform manipulation tasks in reasonable amounts of time, but also to robustly adapt to new environments by handling new objects. In particular, this architecture provides automatic perception capabilities that will allow robots to, (i) incrementally learn object categories from the set of accumulated experiences and (ii) infer how to grasp household objects in different situations. To examine the performance of the proposed architecture, quantitative and qualitative evaluations have been carried out. Experimental results show that the proposed system is able to interact with human users, learn new object categories over time, as well as perform object grasping tasks.

  9. Ramon Izquierdo-Cordova, Eduardo F. Morales, L. Enrique Sucar, and Rafael Murrieta-Cid. Searching objects in known environments: Empowering simple heuristic strategies. In Sven Behnke, Raymond Sheh, Sanem Sariel, and Daniel D. Lee, editors, RoboCup 2016: Robot World Cup XX, pages 380–391, Cham, 2017. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    We consider the problem of exploring a known structured environment to find an object with a mobile robot. We proposed a novel heuristic-based strategy for reducing the traveled distance by first obtaining an exploration order of the rooms in the environment and then, searching for the object in each room by positioning the robot through a set of viewpoints. For the exploration order we proposed a heuristic based on the distance from the robot to the room, the probability of finding the object therein and the room area; integrated in a $$O(n^2)$$O(n2)complexity greedy algorithm that selects the next room. The experimental results show an advantage of the proposed heuristic over other methods in terms of expected traveled distance, except for full search which has a complexity of O(n!). For the exploration within each room, we integrate the localization of horizontal flat surfaces with the generation of poses. With the set of poses, a similar heuristic establishes the exploration order that guides the robot path inside the room. The evaluation of the set of poses shows an average coverage of the flat surfaces of more than 90% when it is configured with an overlap of 40%. Experiments were performed with a real robot using three objects in a six-room environment. The success rate for the robot finding the object is 86.6%.

  10. Sebastian Meyer zu Borgsen, Timo Korthals, Florian Lier, and Sven Wachsmuth. Tobi — team of bielefeld: Enhancing robot behaviors and the role of multi-robotics in robocup@home. In Sven Behnke, Raymond Sheh, Sanem Sariel, and Daniel D. Lee, editors, RoboCup 2016: Robot World Cup XX, pages 577–588, Cham, 2017. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper, we describe the joint effort of the Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) which won the RoboCup@Home competition in Leipzig 2016. RoboCup@Home consists of a defined set of benchmarking tests that cover multiple skills needed by service robots. We present the robotic platforms, technical contributions, and lessons learned from previous events that led to the final success this year. This includes a framework for behavior modeling and communication employed on two human-sized robots Floka and Biron as well as on the small robotic device AMiRo. These were used for a multi-robot collaboration scenario in the Finals. We describe our main contributions in automated testing, error handling, memorization and reporting, robot-robot coordination, and flexible grasping that considers object shape.

  11. Tim Niemueller, Tobias Neumann, Christoph Henke, Sebastian Schönitz, Sebastian Reuter, Alexander Ferrein, Sabina Jeschke, and Gerhard Lakemeyer. International harting open source award 2016: Fawkes for the robocup logistics league. In Sven Behnke, Raymond Sheh, Sanem Sariel, and Daniel D. Lee, editors, RoboCup 2016: Robot World Cup XX, pages 634–642, Cham, 2017. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Since 2014, we have made three releases of our full software stack for the RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) based on the Open Source Fawkes Robot Software Framework. They include all software components of the team Carologistics which won RoboCup 2014, 2015, and 2016. The software is based on experience from participating in a number of leagues with the AllemaniACs RoboCup@Home team being another active contributor. We think that these releases have made the RCLL more accessible to new teams and helped established ones to improve their performance. The team is proud to have been selected for the third place of the 1st International Harting Open Source Award in 2016. In this paper, we give an overview of the framework and its development.

  12. Kai Chen, Dongcai Lu, Yingfeng Chen, Keke Tang, Ningyang Wang, and Xiaoping Chen. The intelligent techniques in robot kejia  — the champion of robocup@home 2014. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 130–141, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper, we present the details of our team WrightEagle@Home’s approaches. Our KeJia robot won the RoboCup@Home competition 2014 and accomplished two tests which have never been fully solved before. Our work covers research issues ranging from hardware, perception and high-level cognitive functions. All these techniques and the whole robot system have been exhaustively tested in the competition and have shown good robustness.

  13. David Schwarz, Max Schwarz, Jörg Stückler, and Sven Behnke. Cosero, find my keys! object localization and retrieval using bluetooth low energy tags. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 195–206, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Personal robots will contribute mobile manipulation capabilities to our future smart homes. In this paper, we propose a low-cost object localization system that uses static devices with Bluetooth capabilities, which are distributed in an environment, to detect and localize active Bluetooth beacons and mobile devices. This system can be used by a robot to coarsely localize objects in retrieval tasks. We attach small Bluetooth low energy tags to objects and require at least four static Bluetooth receivers. While commodity Bluetooth devices could be used, we have built low-cost receivers from Raspberry Pi computers. The location of a tag is estimated by lateration of its received signal strengths. In experiments, we evaluate accuracy and timing of our approach, and report on the successful demonstration at the RoboCup German Open 2014 competition in Magdeburg.

  14. Luz Martínez, Patricio Loncomilla, and Javier Ruiz-del Solar. Object recognition for manipulation tasks in real domestic settings: A comparative study. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 207–219, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    The recognition of objects is a relevant ability in service robotics, especially in manipulation tasks. There are many different approaches to object recognition, but they have not been properly analyzed and compared by considering real conditions of manipulation tasks in domestic setups. The main goal of this paper is to analyze some popular object recognition methods and to compare their performance in realistic manipulation setups. Object recognition methods based on SIFT, SURF, VFH, OUR-CVFH and color histogram descriptors are considered in this study. The results of this comparison can be of interest for researchers working in the development of similar systems (e.g. RoboCup @home teams).

  15. Emanuele Bastianelli, Luca Iocchi, Daniele Nardi, Giuseppe Castellucci, Danilo Croce, and Roberto Basili. Robocup@home spoken corpus: Using robotic competitions for gathering datasets. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 19–30, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    The definition of high quality datasets for benchmarking single components and entire systems in intelligent robots is a fundamental task for developing, testing and comparing different technical solutions. In this paper, we describe the methodology adopted for the acquisition and the creation of a spoken corpus for domestic and service robots. The corpus has been inspired by and acquired in the RoboCup@Home setting, with the involvement of RoboCup@Home participants. The annotated data set is publicly available for developing, testing and comparing speech understanding functionalities of domestic and service robots, not only for teams involved in RoboCup@Home or in other competitions, but also for research groups active in the field. We regard the construction of the dataset as a first step towards a full benchmarking methodology for spoken language interaction in service robotics.

  16. Zhe Zhao and Xiaoping Chen. Towards spatio-temporally consistent semantic mapping. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 258–269, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Intelligent robots require a semantic map of the surroundings for applications such as navigation and object localization. In order to generate the semantic map, previous works mainly focus on the semantic segmentations on the single RGB-D images and fuse the results by a simple majority vote. However, single image based semantic segmentation algorithms are prone to producing inconsistent segments. Little attentions are paid to the consistency over the semantic map. We present a spatio-temporally consistent semantic mapping approach which can generate the temporal consistent segmentations and enforce the spatial consistency by Dense CRF model. We compare our temporal consistent segment algorithm with the state-of-art approach and generate our semantic map on the NYU v2 dataset.

  17. Rodrigo Ventura and Aamir Ahmad. Towards optimal robot navigation in domestic spaces. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 318–331, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    The work presented in this paper is motivated by the goal of dependable autonomous navigation of mobile robots. This goal is a fundamental requirement for having autonomous robots in spaces such as domestic spaces and public establishments, left unattended by technical staff. In this paper we tackle this problem by taking an optimization approach: on one hand, we use a Fast Marching Approach for path planning, resulting in optimal paths in the absence of unmapped obstacles, and on the other hand we use a Dynamic Window Approach for guidance. To the best of our knowledge, the combination of these two methods is novel. We evaluate the approach on a real mobile robot, capable of moving at high speed. The evaluation makes use of an external ground truth system. We report controlled experiments that we performed, including the presence of people moving randomly nearby the robot. In our long term experiments we report a total distance of 18 km traveled during 11 h of movement time.

  18. Jose Sanchez, Sven Schneider, and Paul Plöger. Safely grasping with complex dexterous hands by tactile feedback. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 332–344, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Robots capable of assisting elderly people in their homes will become indispensable, since the world population is aging at an alarming rate. A crucial requirement for these robotic caregivers will be the ability to safely interact with humans, such as firmly grasping a human arm without applying excessive force. Minding this concern, we developed a reactive grasp that, using tactile sensors, monitors the pressure it exerts during manipulation. Our approach, inspired by human manipulation, employs an architecture based on different grasping phases that represent particular stages in a manipulation task. Within these phases, we implemented and composed simple components to interpret and react to the information obtained by the tactile sensors. Empirical results, using a Care-O-bot 3® with a Schunk Dexterous Hand (SDH-2), show that considering tactile information can reduce the force exerted on the objects significantly.

  19. Dirk Holz, Javier Ruiz del Solar, Komei Sugiura, and Sven Wachsmuth. On robocup@home — past, present and future of a scientific competition for service robots. In Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi, H. Levent Akin, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Komei Sugiura, editors, RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages 686–697, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    RoboCup@Home is an application-oriented league within the annual RoboCup events. It focuses on domestic service robots and mobile manipulators interacting with human users. Participating robots need to solve tasks ranging from following and guiding human users to delivering objects, e.g., in a supermarket.

  20. Guglielmo Gemignani, Manuela Veloso, and Daniele Nardi. Language-based sensing descriptors for robot object grounding. In Luis Almeida, Jianmin Ji, Gerald Steinbauer, and Sean Luke, editors, RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX, pages 3–15, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In this work, we consider an autonomous robot that is required to understand commands given by a human through natural language. Specifically, we assume that this robot is provided with an internal representation of the environment. However, such a representation is unknown to the user. In this context, we address the problem of allowing a human to understand the robot internal representation through dialog. To this end, we introduce the concept of sensing descriptors. Such representations are used by the robot to recognize unknown object properties in the given commands and warn the user about them. Additionally, we show how these properties can be learned over time by leveraging past interactions in order to enhance the grounding capabilities of the robot.

  21. Dongcai Lu and Xiaoping Chen. Towards an architecture combining grounding and planning for human-robot interaction. In Luis Almeida, Jianmin Ji, Gerald Steinbauer, and Sean Luke, editors, RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX, pages 214–225, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    We consider here the problem of connecting natural language to the physical world for robotic object manipulation. This problem needs to be solved in robotic reasoning systems so that the robot can act in the real world. In this paper, we propose an architecture that combines grounding and planning to enable robots to solve such a problem. The grounding system of the architecture grounds the meaning of a natural language sentence in physical environment perceived by the robot’s sensors and generates a knowledge base of the physical environment. Then the planning system utilizes the knowledge base to infer a plan for object manipulation, which can be effectively generated by an Answer Set Programming (ASP) planner. We evaluate the overall architecture on several datasets and a task of RoboCup2014@home (http://www.robocup2014.org/). The results show that the new architecture outperformed some other systems, and yielded acceptable performance in a real-world scenario.

  22. María-Loreto Sánchez, Mauricio Correa, Luz Martínez, and Javier Ruiz-del Solar. An episodic long-term memory for robots: The bender case. In Luis Almeida, Jianmin Ji, Gerald Steinbauer, and Sean Luke, editors, RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX, pages 264–275, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    The main goal of this paper is to propose a framework for providing an episodic long-term memory for a robot, which includes methods for acquiring, storing, updating, managing and using episodic information. This will give a robot the ability to incorporate past experiences when interacting with humans, so that the data that the robot learns transcends each session, and thus gives continuity to its activities and behaviors. As a proof of concept, the implementation of an episodic long-term memory for the Bender robot is described. This includes the implementation and evaluation of a behavior called Conversation, which allows Bender to interact with people using the information stored in the episodic memory.

  23. Tim Niemueller, Sebastian Reuter, and Alexander Ferrein. Fawkes for the robocup logistics league. In Luis Almeida, Jianmin Ji, Gerald Steinbauer, and Sean Luke, editors, RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX, pages 365–373, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Autonomous mobile robots comprise a great deal of complexity. They require a plethora of software components for perception, actuation, task-level reasoning, and communication. These components have to be integrated into a coherent and robust system in time for the next RoboCup event. Then, during the competition, the system has to perform stable and reliably. Providing a software framework for teams to use tremendously eases that effort. Even more so when providing a fully integrated system specific for a particular domain.

  24. Min Cheng, Xiaoping Chen, Keke Tang, Feng Wu, Andras Kupcsik, Luca Iocchi, Yingfeng Chen, and David Hsu. Synthetical benchmarking of service robots: A first effort on domestic mobile platforms. In Luis Almeida, Jianmin Ji, Gerald Steinbauer, and Sean Luke, editors, RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX, pages 377–388, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    Most of existing benchmarking tools for service robots are basically qualitative, in which a robot’s performance on a task is evaluated based on completion/incompletion of actions contained in the task. In the effort reported in this paper, we tried to implement a synthetical benchmarking system on domestic mobile platforms. Synthetical benchmarking consists of both qualitative and quantitative aspects, such as task completion, accuracy of task completions and efficiency of task completions, about performance of a robot. The system includes a set of algorithms for collecting, recording and analyzing measurement data from a MoCap system. It was used as the evaluator in a competition called the BSR challenge, in which 10 teams participated, at RoboCup 2015. The paper presents our motivations behind synthetical benchmarking, the design considerations on the synthetical benchmarking system, the realization of the competition as a comparative study on performance evaluation of domestic mobile platforms, and an analysis of the teams’ performance.

  25. Yingfeng Chen, Feng Wu, Ningyang Wang, Keke Tang, Min Cheng, and Xiaoping Chen. Kejia-lc: A low-cost mobile robot platform — champion of demo challenge on benchmarking service robots at robocup 2015. In Luis Almeida, Jianmin Ji, Gerald Steinbauer, and Sean Luke, editors, RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX, pages 60–71, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper, we present the system design and the key techniques of our mobile robot platform called KeJia-LC, who won the first place in the demo challenge on Benchmarkinng Service Robots in RoboCup 2015. Given the fact that KeJia-LC is a low-cost version of our KeJia robot without shoulder and arm, several new technical demands comparing to RoboCup@Home are highlighted for better understanding of our system. With the elaborate design of hardware and the reasonable selection of sensors, our robot platform has the features of low cost, wide generality and good extensibility. Moreover, we integrate several functional softwares (such as 2D&3D mapping, localization and navigation) following the competition rules, which are critical to the performance of our robot. The effectiveness and robustness of our robot system has been proven in the competition.

  26. Viktor Seib, Stephan Manthe, Raphael Memmesheimer, Florian Polster, and Dietrich Paulus. Team homer@unikoblenz — approaches and contributions to the robocup@home competition. In Luis Almeida, Jianmin Ji, Gerald Steinbauer, and Sean Luke, editors, RoboCup 2015: Robot World Cup XIX, pages 83–94, Cham, 2015. Springer International Publishing. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper we present the approaches and contributions of team homer@UniKoblenz that were developed for and applied during the RoboCup@Home competitions. In particular, we highlight the different abstraction layers of our software architecture that allows for rapid application development based on the ROS actionlib. This architectural design enables us to focus on the development of new algorithms and approaches and significantly helped us in winning the RoboCup@Home competition in 2015. We further give an outlook on recently published open-source software for service robots that can be downloaded from our ROS package repository on http://wiki.ros.org/agas-ros-pkg.

  27. Jörg Stückler, David Droeschel, Kathrin Gräve, Dirk Holz, Michael Schreiber, Angeliki Topalidou-Kyniazopoulou, Max Schwarz, and Sven Behnke. Increasing flexibility of mobile manipulation and intuitive human-robot interaction in robocup@home. In Sven Behnke, Manuela Veloso, Arnoud Visser, and Rong Xiong, editors, RoboCup 2013: Robot World Cup XVII, pages 135–146, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper, we describe system and approaches of our team NimbRo@Home that won the RoboCup@Home competition 2013. We designed a multi-purpose gripper for grasping typical household objects in pick-and-place tasks and also for using tools. The tools are complementarily equipped with special handles that establish form closure with the gripper, which resists wrenches in any direction. We demonstrate tool use for opening a bottle and grasping sausages with a pair of tongs in a barbecue scenario. We also devised efficient deformable registration methods for the transfer of manipulation skills between objects of the same kind but with differing shape. Finally, we enhance human-robot interaction with a remote user interface for handheld PCs that enables a user to control capabilities of the robot. These capabilities have been demonstrated in the open challenges of the competition. We also explain our approaches to the predefined tests of the competition, and report on the performance of our robots at RoboCup 2013.

  28. Jos Elfring, Simon Jansen, René van de Molengraft, and Maarten Steinbuch. Active object search exploiting probabilistic object–object relations. In Sven Behnke, Manuela Veloso, Arnoud Visser, and Rong Xiong, editors, RoboCup 2013: Robot World Cup XVII, pages 13–24, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    This paper proposes a probabilistic object-object relation based approach for an active object search. An important role of mobile robots will be to perform object-related tasks and active object search strategies deal with the non-trivial task of finding an object in unstructured and dynamically changing environments. This work builds further upon an existing approach exploiting probabilistic object-room relations for selecting the room in which an object is expected to be. Learnt object-object relations allow to search for objects inside a room via a chain of intermediate objects. Simulations have been performed to investigate the effect of the camera quality on path length and failure rate. Furthermore, a comparison is made with a benchmark algorithm based the same prior knowledge but without using a chain of intermediate objects. An experiment shows the potential of the proposed approach on the AMIGO robot.

  29. Anastassia Küstenmacher, Naveed Akhtar, Paul G. Plöger, and Gerhard Lakemeyer. Unexpected situations in service robot environment: Classification and reasoning using naive physics. In Sven Behnke, Manuela Veloso, Arnoud Visser, and Rong Xiong, editors, RoboCup 2013: Robot World Cup XVII, pages 219–230, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Despite perfect functioning of its internal components, a robot can be unsuccessful in performing its tasks because of unforeseen situations. Mostly these situations arise from the interaction of a robot with its ever-changing environment. In this paper we refer to these unsuccessful operations as external unknown faults. We reason along the most frequent failures in typical scenarios which we observed during real-world demonstrations and competitions using our Care-O-bot III robot. These events take place in an apartment-like environment.

  30. Wilma Pairo, Javier Ruiz-del Solar, Rodrigo Verschae, Mauricio Correa, and Patricio Loncomilla. Person following by mobile robots: Analysis of visual and range tracking methods and technologies. In Sven Behnke, Manuela Veloso, Arnoud Visser, and Rong Xiong, editors, RoboCup 2013: Robot World Cup XVII, pages 231–243, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Person following by mobile robots in unconstrained environments has not been yet successfully solved, and new approaches to tackle this problem need to be developed. The main goal of this article is to analyze the use of state-of-the-art computer vision methods for human detection and tracking when a robot is trying to follow a person. The methods were selected taking into account their accuracy in previous studies as well as being real-time or near real-time. Thus, tracking based on a HOG person detector, tracking-by-detection with Kernels and compressive tracking were analyzed and compared to methods based on the use of Kinect and laser sensors using a database built specifically for this purpose. The database was captured using a service robot, and it considers real-world conditions. The results show that the vision-based methods are much more robust for tracking purposes than standard range-based methods used by the robotics community, although being slower.

  31. Matteo Luperto, Alberto Quattrini Li, and Francesco Amigoni. A system for building semantic maps of indoor environments exploiting the concept of building typology. In Sven Behnke, Manuela Veloso, Arnoud Visser, and Rong Xiong, editors, RoboCup 2013: Robot World Cup XVII, pages 504–515, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Semantic mapping of indoor environments refers to the task of building representations of these environments that associate spatial concepts with spatial entities. In particular, semantic labels, like `rooms’ and `corridors’ are associated to portions of an underlying metric map, to allow robots or humans to exploit this additional knowledge. Usually, the classifiers that build semantic maps process data coming from laser range scanners and cameras and do not consider the specific type of the mapped building. However, in architecture it is well known that each building has a specific typology. The concept of building typology denotes the set of buildings that have the same function (e.g., being a school building) and that share the same structural features. In this paper, we exploit the concept of building typology to build semantic maps of indoor environments. The proposed system uses only data from laser range scanners and creates a specific classifier for each building typology, showing good classification accuracy.

  32. Janno Lunenburg, Robin Soetens, Ferry Schoenmakers, Paul Metsemakers, René van de Molengraft, and Maarten Steinbuch. Sharing open hardware through rop, the robotic open platform. In Sven Behnke, Manuela Veloso, Arnoud Visser, and Rong Xiong, editors, RoboCup 2013: Robot World Cup XVII, pages 584–591, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The robot open source software community, in particular ROS, drastically boosted robotics research. However, a centralized place to exchange open hardware designs does not exist. Therefore we launched the Robotic Open Platform (ROP). A place to share and discuss open hardware designs. Among others it currently contains detailed descriptions of Willow Garage’s TurtleBot, the NimbRo-OP created by the University of Bonn and the AMIGO robot of Tech United Eindhoven. Eventually, ROP will contain a collection of affordable hardware components, allowing researchers to focus on cutting-edge research on a particular component instead of having to design the entire robot from scratch. As an example of how the Robotic Open Platform is able to facilitate this knowledge transfer, we introduce TURTLE-5k: A redesign of an existing soccer robot by a consortium of our university and companies in the wider Eindhoven area. Cooperating with industrial partners resulted in a significant cost reduction.

  33. Jörg Stückler, Ishrat Badami, David Droeschel, Kathrin Gräve, Dirk Holz, Manus McElhone, Matthias Nieuwenhuisen, Michael Schreiber, Max Schwarz, and Sven Behnke. Nimbro@home: Winning team of the robocup@home competition 2012. In Xiaoping Chen, Peter Stone, Luis Enrique Sucar, and Tijn van der Zant, editors, RoboCup 2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, pages 94–105, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper we describe details of our winning team Nimb-Ro@Home at the RoboCup@Home competition 2012. This year we improved the gripper design of our robots and further advanced mobile manipulation capabilities such as object perception and manipulation planning. For human-robot interaction, we propose to complement face-to-face communication between user and robot with a remote user interface for handheld PCs. We report on the use of our approaches and the performance of our robots at RoboCup 2012.

  34. Frederik Hegger, Nico Hochgeschwender, Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar, and Paul G. Ploeger. People detection in 3d point clouds using local surface normals. In Xiaoping Chen, Peter Stone, Luis Enrique Sucar, and Tijn van der Zant, editors, RoboCup 2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, pages 154–165, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The ability to detect people in domestic and unconstrained environments is crucial for every service robot. The knowledge where people are is required to perform several tasks such as navigation with dynamic obstacle avoidance and human-robot-interaction. In this paper we propose a people detection approach based on 3d data provided by a RGB-D camera. We introduce a novel 3d feature descriptor based on Local Surface Normals (LSN) which is used to learn a classifier in a supervised machine learning manner. In order to increase the systems flexibility and to detect people even under partial occlusion we introduce a top-down/bottom-up segmentation. We deployed the people detection system on a real-world service robot operating at a reasonable frame rate of 5Hz. The experimental results show that our approach is able to detect persons in various poses and motions such as sitting, walking, and running.

  35. Jianmin Ji, Zhiqiang Sui, Guoqiang Jin, Jiongkun Xie, and Xiaoping Chen. Simulation competitions on domestic robots. In Xiaoping Chen, Peter Stone, Luis Enrique Sucar, and Tijn van der Zant, editors, RoboCup 2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, pages 166–177, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    This paper reports a series of simulation competitions on domestic robots. All of these five competitions were based on a simulation platform focused on evaluating high-level functions of a domestic robot, including task planning and dialogue understanding. The object of holding these competitions is to promote research and development of service robots while avoiding limitations imposed by hardware of real robots. We also analyze the results and performances of participating teams since the competition was first held in 2009, showing that more and more terms are participating and they are performing better and better.

  36. José Antonio Álvarez Ruiz, Paul Plöger, and Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar. Active scene text recognition for a domestic service robot. In Xiaoping Chen, Peter Stone, Luis Enrique Sucar, and Tijn van der Zant, editors, RoboCup 2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, pages 249–260, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    We developed a scene text recognition system with active vision capabilities, namely: auto-focus, adaptive aperture control and auto-zoom. Our localization system is able to delimit text regions in images with complex backgrounds, and is based on an attentional cascade, asymmetric adaboost, decision trees and Gaussian mixture models. We think that text could become a valuable source of semantic information for robots, and we aim to raise interest in it within the robotics community. Moreover, thanks to the robot’s pan-tilt-zoom camera and to the active vision behaviors, the robot can use its affordances to overcome hindrances to the performance of the perceptual task. Detrimental conditions, such as poor illumination, blur, low resolution, etc. are very hard to deal with once an image has been captured and can often be prevented. We evaluated the localization algorithm on a public dataset and one of our own with encouraging results. Furthermore, we offer an interesting experiment in active vision, which makes us consider that active sensing in general should be considered early on when addressing complex perceptual problems in embodied agents.

  37. Sander van Noort and Arnoud Visser. Extending virtual robots towards robocup soccer simulation and @home. In Xiaoping Chen, Peter Stone, Luis Enrique Sucar, and Tijn van der Zant, editors, RoboCup 2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, pages 332–343, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The RoboCup is an initiative to promote the development of robotics in a social relevant way. The competition consists of several leagues and it would be beneficial if developments in one league could be reused in other leagues. This paper describes the development of a simulation model for a humanoid robot inside USARSim, which could be the basis of synergy between the Rescue Simulation, Soccer Simulation and @Home League. USARSim is an existing 3D simulator based on the Unreal Engine, which provides facilities for good quality rendering, physics simulation, networking, a highly versatile scripting language and a powerful visual editor. This simulator is now extended with the dynamics of a walking robot and validated for the humanoid robot Nao. On this basis many other robotic applications as benchmarked in the RoboCup initiative become possible.

  38. Gerald Steinbauer. A survey about faults of robots used in robocup. In Xiaoping Chen, Peter Stone, Luis Enrique Sucar, and Tijn van der Zant, editors, RoboCup 2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, pages 344–355, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Faults that occur in an autonomous robot system negatively affect its dependability. The aim of truly dependable and autonomous systems requires that one has to deal with these faults in some way. In order to be able to do this efficiently one has to have information on the nature of these faults. Very few studies on this topic have been conducted so far. In this paper we present results of a survey on faults of autonomous robots we conducted in the context of RoboCup. The major contribution of this paper is twofold. First we present an adapted fault taxonomy suitable for autonomous robots. Second we give information on the nature, the relevance and impact of faults in robot systems that are beneficial for researcher dealing with fault mitigation and management in autonomous systems.

  39. Christian A. Mueller, Nico Hochgeschwender, and Paul G. Ploeger. Towards robust object categorization for mobile robots with combination of classifiers. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 137–148, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    An efficient object perception is a crucial component of a mobile service robot. In this work we present a solution for visual categorization of objects. We developed a prototypic categorization system which classifies unknown objects based on their visual properties to a corresponding category of predefined domestic object categories. The system uses the Bag of Features approach which does not rely on global geometric object information. A major contribution of our work is the enhancement of the categorization accuracy and robustness through a selected combination of a set of supervised machine learners which are trained with visual information from object instances. Experimental results are provided which benchmark the behavior and verify the performance regarding the accuracy and robustness of the proposed system. The system is integrated on a mobile service robot to enhance its perceptual capabilities, hence computational cost and robot dependent properties are considered as essential design criteria.

  40. Román Marchant, Pablo Guerrero, and Javier Ruiz-del Solar. A portable ground-truth system based on a laser sensor. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 234–245, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    State estimation is of crucial importance to mobile robotics since it determines in a great measure its ability to model the world from noisy observations. In order to quantitatively evaluate state-estimation methods, the availability of ground-truth data is essential since it provides a target that the result of the state-estimation methods should approximate. Most of the reported ground-truth systems require a complex assembly which limit their applicability and make their set-up long and complicated. Furthermore, they often require a long calibration procedure. Additionally, they do not present measures of their accuracy. This paper proposes a portable laser-based ground-truth system. The proposed system can be easily ported from one environment to other and requires almost no calibration. Quantitative results are presented with the purpose of encouraging future comparisons among different ground-truth systems. The presented method has shown to be accurate enough to evaluate state-estimation methods and works in real time.

  41. Dirk Holz, Stefan Holzer, Radu Bogdan Rusu, and Sven Behnke. Real-time plane segmentation using rgb-d cameras. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 306–317, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Real-time 3D perception of the surrounding environment is a crucial precondition for the reliable and safe application of mobile service robots in domestic environments. Using a RGB-D camera, we present a system for acquiring and processing 3D (semantic) information at frame rates of up to 30Hz that allows a mobile robot to reliably detect obstacles and segment graspable objects and supporting surfaces as well as the overall scene geometry. Using integral images, we compute local surface normals. The points are then clustered, segmented, and classified in both normal space and spherical coordinates. The system is tested in different setups in a real household environment.

  42. Geovanny Giorgana and Paul G. Ploeger. Facial expression recognition for domestic service robots. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 353–364, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    We present a system to automatically recognize facial expressions from static images. Our approach consists of extracting particular Gabor features from normalized face images and mapping them into three of the six basic emotions: joy, surprise and sadness, plus neutrality. Selection of the Gabor features is performed via the AdaBoost algorithm. We evaluated two learning machines (AdaBoost and Support Vector Machines), two multi-classification strategies (Error-Correcting Output Codes and One-vs-One) and two face image sizes (48 x 48 and 96 x 96). Images of the Cohn-Kanade AU-Coded Facial Expression Database were used as test bed for our research. Best results (87.14% recognition rate) were obtained using Support Vector Machines in combination with Error-Correcting Output Codes and normalized face images of 96 x 96.

  43. Jose Figueroa, Luis Contreras, Abel Pacheco, and Jesus Savage. Development of an object recognition and location system using the microsoft kinecttm sensor. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 440–449, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    This paper presents the development of an object recognition and location system using the Microsoft KinectTM, an off-the-shelf sensor for videogames console Microsoft Xbox 360TM which is formed by a color camera and depth sensor. This sensor is capable of capturing color images and depth information from a scene. This vision system uses a) data fusion of both color camera and depth sensor to segment objects by distance; b) scale-invariant features to characterize and recognize objects; and c) camera’s internal parameters combined with depth information to locate objects relative to the camera point of view. The system will be used along with a robotic arm to grab objects.

  44. Tijn van der Zant. Adaptivity on the robot brain architecture level using reinforcement learning. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 528–537, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The design and implementation of a robot brain often requires making decisions between different modules with similar functionality. Many implementations and components are easy to create or can be downloaded, but it is difficult to assess which combination of modules work well and which does not. This paper discusses a reinforcement learning mechanism where the robot is choosing between the different components using empirical feedback and optimization criteria. With the interval estimation algorithm the robot deselects poorly functioning modules and retains only the best ones. A discount factor ensures that the robot keeps adapting to new circumstances in the real world. This allows the robot to adapt itself continuously on the architecture level and also allows working with large development teams creating several different implementations with similar functionalities to give the robot biggest chance to solve a task. The architecture is tested in the RoboCup@Home setting and can handle failure situations.

  45. Jörg Stückler, David Droeschel, Kathrin Gräve, Dirk Holz, Jochen Kläß, Michael Schreiber, Ricarda Steffens, and Sven Behnke. Towards robust mobility, flexible object manipulation, and intuitive multimodal interaction for domestic service robots. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 51–62, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper, we detail the contributions of our team NimbRo to the RoboCup @Home league in 2011. We explain design and rationale of our domestic service robot Cosero that we used for the first time in a competition in 2011. We demonstrated novel capabilities in the league such as real-time table-top segmentation, flexible grasp planning, and real-time tracking of objects. We also describe our approaches to human-robot cooperative manipulation and 3D navigation. Finally, we report on the use of our approaches and the performance of our robots at RoboCup 2011.

  46. Jörg Stückler and Sven Behnke. Compliant task-space control with back-drivable servo actuators. In Thomas Röfer, N. Michael Mayer, Jesus Savage, and Uluc Saranli, editors, RoboCup 2011: Robot Soccer World Cup XV, pages 78–89, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    In this paper, we propose a new approach to compliant task-space control for high degree-of-freedom manipulators driven by position-controlled actuators. The actuators in our approach are back-drivable and allow to limit the torque used for position control. Traditional approaches frequently achieve compliance through redundancy resolution. Our approach not only allows to adjust compliance in the null-space of the motion but also in the individual dimensions in task-space. From differential inverse kinematics we derive torque limits for each joint by examining the contribution of the joints to the task-space motion. We evaluate our approach in experiments with specific motions. We also report on the application of our approach at RoboCup 2010, where we successfully opened and closed the fridge in the RoboCup@Home finals.

  47. Dirk Holz, Ruwen Schnabel, David Droeschel, Jörg Stückler, and Sven Behnke. Towards semantic scene analysis with time-of-flight cameras. In Javier Ruiz-del Solar, Eric Chown, and Paul G. Plöger, editors, RoboCup 2010: Robot Soccer World Cup XIV, pages 121–132, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    For planning grasps and other object manipulation actions in complex environments, 3D semantic information becomes crucial. This paper focuses on the application of recent 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras in the context of semantic scene analysis. For being able to acquire semantic information from ToF camera data, we a) pre-process the data including outlier removal, filtering and phase unwrapping for correcting erroneous distance measurements, and b) apply a randomized algorithm for detecting shapes such as planes, spheres, and cylinders. We present experimental results that show that the robustness against noise and outliers of the underlying RANSAC paradigm allows for segmenting and classifying objects in 3D ToF camera data captured in natural mobile manipulation setups.

  48. Jörg Stückler and Sven Behnke. Improving people awareness of service robots by semantic scene knowledge. In Javier Ruiz-del Solar, Eric Chown, and Paul G. Plöger, editors, RoboCup 2010: Robot Soccer World Cup XIV, pages 157–168, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Many mobile service robots operate in close interaction with humans. Being constantly aware of the people in the surrounding of the robot thus poses an important challenge to perception and behavior design.

  49. Mauricio Correa, Javier Ruiz-del Solar, S. Isao Parra-Tsunekawa, and Rodrigo Verschae. A realistic simulation tool for testing face recognition systems under real-world conditions. In Javier Ruiz-del Solar, Eric Chown, and Paul G. Plöger, editors, RoboCup 2010: Robot Soccer World Cup XIV, pages 13–24, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    In this article, a tool for testing face recognition systems under uncontrolled conditions is proposed. The key elements of this tool are a simulator and real face and background images taken under real-world conditions with different acquisition angles. Inside the simulated environment, an observing agent, the one with the ability to recognize faces, can navigate and observe the real face images, at different distances, angles and with indoor or outdoor illumination. During the face recognition process, the agent can actively change its viewpoint and relative distance to the faces in order to improve the recognition results. The simulation tool provides all functionalities to the agent (navigation, positioning, face’s image composing under different angles, etc.), except the ones related with the recognition of faces. This tool could be of high interest for HRI applications related with the visual recognition of humans, as the ones included in the RoboCup @Home league. It allows comparing and quantifying the face recognition capabilities of service robots under exactly equal working conditions. It could be a complement to existing tests in the RoboCup @Home league. The applicability of the proposed tool is validated in the comparison of three state of the art face recognition methods.

  50. Viktor Seib, David Gossow, Sebastian Vetter, and Dietrich Paulus. Hierarchical multi-robot coordination. In Javier Ruiz-del Solar, Eric Chown, and Paul G. Plöger, editors, RoboCup 2010: Robot Soccer World Cup XIV, pages 314–323, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The complexity and variety of household chores creates conflicting demands on the technical design of domestic robots. One solution for this problem is the coordination of several specialized robots based on the master-slave principle. One robot acts as a master system, tracking and remotely controlling the slave robots. This way, only the master robot needs to be equipped with sophisticated sensors and computing hardware. We implemented a tracking system using an infra-red camera for the master and active markers on the slave robot. The master system is able to interact with the user using natural language. It builds a map of its environment automatically using a laser range finder. It can track a cleaning robot for which we use the commercially available platform “Roomba” by iRobot. The master safely navigates it to a given destination, avoiding obstacles. We successfully demonstrated the system during the RoboCup@Home competitions 2009 in Graz, Austria. We evaluate the performance of the two systems and describe the accuracy of localization and navigation.

  51. Gabriel Hermosilla, Patricio Loncomilla, and Javier Ruiz-del Solar. Thermal face recognition using local interest points and descriptors for hri applications. In Javier Ruiz-del Solar, Eric Chown, and Paul G. Plöger, editors, RoboCup 2010: Robot Soccer World Cup XIV, pages 25–35, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    In this article a robust thermal face recognition methodology based on the use of local interest points and descriptors, is proposed. The methodology consists of the following stages: face segmentation, vascular network detection, wide baseline matching using local interest points and descriptors, and classification. The main contribution of this work is the use of a standard wide baseline matching methodology for the comparison of vascular networks from thermal face images. The proposed methodology is validated using a database of thermal images. This work could be of high interest for HRI applications related with the visual recognition of humans, as the ones included in the RoboCup @Home league, because the use of thermal images may overcome limitations such as dependency on illumination conditions and facial expressions.

  52. Dirk Holz, Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar, and Erich Rome. Robust and computationally efficient navigation in domestic environments. In Jacky Baltes, Michail G. Lagoudakis, Tadashi Naruse, and Saeed Shiry Ghidary, editors, RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII, pages 104–115, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Presented in this paper is a complete system for robust autonomous navigation in cluttered and dynamic environments. It consists of computationally efficient approaches to the problems of simultaneous localization and mapping, path planning, and motion control, all based on a memory-efficient environment representation. These components have been implemented and integrated with additional components for human-robot interaction and object manipulation on a mobile manipulation platform for service robot applications. The resulting system performed very successfully in the 2008 RoboCup@Home competition.

  53. Stefan Jacobs, Alexander Ferrein, Stefan Schiffer, Daniel Beck, and Gerhard Lakemeyer. Robust collision avoidance in unknown domestic environments. In Jacky Baltes, Michail G. Lagoudakis, Tadashi Naruse, and Saeed Shiry Ghidary, editors, RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII, pages 116–127, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Service robots operating in domestic indoor environments must be endowed with a safe collision avoidance and navigation method that is reactive enough to avoid contacts with the furniture of the apartment and humans that suddenly appear in front of the robot. Moreover, the method should be local, i.e. should not need a predefined map of the environment. In this paper we describe a navigation and collision avoidance method which is all of that: safe, fast, and local. Based on a geometric grid representation which is derived from the laser range finder of our domestic robot, a path to the next target point is found by employing A*. The obstacles which are used in the local map of the robot are extended depending on the speed the robot travels at. We compute a triangular area in front of the robot which is guaranteed to be free of obstacles. This triangle serves as the space of feasible solutions when searching for the next drive commands. With this triangle, we are able to decouple the path search from the search for drive commands, which tremendously decreases the complexity. We used the proposed method for several years in RoboCup@Home where it was a key factor to our success in the competitions.

  54. J. Ruiz-del Solar, M. Mascaró, M. Correa, F. Bernuy, R. Riquelme, and R. Verschae. Analyzing the human-robot interaction abilities of a general-purpose social robot in different naturalistic environments. In Jacky Baltes, Michail G. Lagoudakis, Tadashi Naruse, and Saeed Shiry Ghidary, editors, RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII, pages 308–319, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The main goal of this article is to report and analyze the applicability of a general-purpose social robot, developed in the context of the RoboCup @Home league, in three different naturalistic environments: (i) home, (ii) school classroom, and (iii) public space settings. The evaluation of the robot’s performance relies on its degree of social acceptance, and its abilities to express emotions and to interact with humans using human-like codes. The reported experiments show that the robot has a large acceptance from expert and non-expert human users, and that it is able to successfully interact with humans using human-like interaction mechanisms, such as speech and visual cues (particularly face information). It is remarkable that the robot can even teach children in a real classroom.

  55. Thomas Wisspeintner, Tijn van der Zan, Luca Iocchi, and Stefan Schiffer. Robocup@home: Results in benchmarking domestic service robots. In Jacky Baltes, Michail G. Lagoudakis, Tadashi Naruse, and Saeed Shiry Ghidary, editors, RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII, pages 390–401, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Benchmarking robotic technologies is of utmost importance for actual deployment of robotic applications in industrial and every-day environments, therefore many efforts have recently focused on this problem. Among the many different ways of benchmarking robotic systems, scientific competitions are recognized as one of the most effective ways of rapid development of scientific progress in a field. The RoboCup@Home league targets the development and deployment of autonomous service and assistive robot technology, being essential for future personal domestic applications, and offers an important approach to benchmarking domestic and service robots.

  56. Evan Wong, Wei Liu, and Xiaoping Chen. Connecting the real world with the virtual world – controlling aibo through second life. In Jacky Baltes, Michail G. Lagoudakis, Tadashi Naruse, and Saeed Shiry Ghidary, editors, RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII, pages 402–413, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The main aim of this project is to develop middleware so that the Second Life online virtual space (virtual world) can be used to simulate and control the movements of a Sony AIBO robot (real world) in a wireless environment. This paper details the design of an immersive teleoperation system, and the rationale behind the design. The prototype proves that the concept of teleoperation with greater sense of immersion is achievable and can lead to future work in application domains such as smart home and immersive remote operating machinery in the industry such as mining.

  57. N. Ergin Özkucur and H. Levent Akin. Cooperative multi-robot map merging using fast-slam. In Jacky Baltes, Michail G. Lagoudakis, Tadashi Naruse, and Saeed Shiry Ghidary, editors, RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII, pages 449–460, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    Multi-robot map merging is an essential task for cooperative robot navigation. In the realistic case, the robots do not know the initial positions of the others and this adds extra challenges to the problem. Some approaches search transformation parameters using the local maps and some approaches assume the robots will observe each other and use robot to robot observations. This work extends a previous work which is based on EKF-SLAM to the Fast-SLAM algorithm. The robots can observe each other and non-unique landmarks using visual sensors and merge maps by propagating uncertainty. Another contribution is the calibration of noise parameters with supervised data using the Evolutionary Strategies method. The developed algorithms are tested in both simulated and real robot experiments and the improvements and applicability of the developed methods are shown with the results.

  58. Mauricio Correa, Javier Ruiz-del Solar, Rodrigo Verschae, Jong Lee-Ferng, and Nelson Castillo. Real-time hand gesture recognition for human robot interaction. In Jacky Baltes, Michail G. Lagoudakis, Tadashi Naruse, and Saeed Shiry Ghidary, editors, RoboCup 2009: Robot Soccer World Cup XIII, pages 46–57, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    In this article a hand gesture recognition system that allows interacting with a service robot, in dynamic environments and in real-time, is proposed. The system detects hands and static gestures using cascade of boosted classifiers, and recognize dynamic gestures by computing temporal statistics of the hand’s positions and velocities, and classifying these features using a Bayes classifier. The main novelty of the proposed approach is the use of context information to adapt continuously the skin model used in the detection of hand candidates, to restrict the image’s regions that need to be analyzed, and to cut down the number of scales that need to be considered in the hand-searching and gesture-recognition processes. The system performance is validated in real video sequences. In average the system recognized static gestures in 70% of the cases, dynamic gestures in 75% of them, and it runs at a variable speed of 5-10 frames per second.

  59. Jesus Savage, Alfredo Weitzenfeld, Francisco Ayala, and Sergio Cuellar. The use of scripts based on conceptual dependency primitives for the operation of service mobile robots. In Luca Iocchi, Hitoshi Matsubara, Alfredo Weitzenfeld, and Changjiu Zhou, editors, RoboCup 2008: Robot Soccer World Cup XII, pages 284–295, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    This paper describes a Human-Robot interaction subsystem that is part of a robotics architecture, the ViRbot, used to control the operation of service mobile robots. The Human/Robot Interface subsystem consists of tree modules: Natural Language Understanding, Speech Generation and Robot’s Facial Expressions. To demonstrate the utility of this Human-Robot interaction subsystem it is presented a set of applications that allows a user to command a mobile robot through spoken commands. The mobile robot accomplish the required commands using an actions planner and reactive behaviors. In the ViRbot architecture the actions planner module uses Conceptual Dependency (CD) primitives as the base for representing the problem domain. After a command is spoken a CD representation of it is generated, a rule base system takes this CD representation, and using the state of the environment generates other subtasks represented by CDs to accomplish the command. In this paper is also presented how to represent context through scripts. Using scripts it is easy to make inferences about events for which there are incomplete information or are ambiguous. Scripts serve to encode common sense knowledge. Scripts are also used to fill the gaps between seemingly unrelated events.

  60. Mauricio Correa, Javier Ruiz-del Solar, and Fernando Bernuy. Face recognition for human-robot interaction applications: A comparative study. In Luca Iocchi, Hitoshi Matsubara, Alfredo Weitzenfeld, and Changjiu Zhou, editors, RoboCup 2008: Robot Soccer World Cup XII, pages 473–484, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The aim of this work is to carry out a comparative study of face-recognition methods for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) applications. The analyzed methods are selected by considering their suitability for HRI use, and their performance in former comparative studies. The methods are compared using standard databases and a new database for HRI applications. The comparative study includes aspects such as variable illumination, facial expression variations, face occlusions, and variable eye detection accuracy, which directly influence face alignment precision. The results of this comparative study are intended to be a guide for developers of face recognition systems for HRI, and they have direct application in the RoboCup@Home league.

  61. W. Bradley Knox, Juhyun Lee, and Peter Stone. Domestic interaction on a segway base. In Luca Iocchi, Hitoshi Matsubara, Alfredo Weitzenfeld, and Changjiu Zhou, editors, RoboCup 2008: Robot Soccer World Cup XII, pages 519–531, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    To be useful in a home environment, an assistive robot needs to be capable of a broad range of interactive activities such as locating objects, following specific people, and distinguishing among different people. This paper presents a Segway-based robot that successfully performed all of these tasks en route to a second place finish in the RoboCup@Home 2007 competition. The main contribution is a complete description and analysis of the robot system and its implemented algorithms that enabled the robot’s successful human-robot interaction in this broad and challenging forum. We describe in detail a novel person recognition algorithm, a key component of our overall success, that included two co-trained classifiers, each focusing on different aspects of the person (face and shirt color).

  62. Patricio Loncomilla and Javier Ruiz-del Solar. Robust object recognition using wide baseline matching for robocup applications. In Ubbo Visser, Fernando Ribeiro, Takeshi Ohashi, and Frank Dellaert, editors, RoboCup 2007: Robot Soccer World Cup XI, pages 441–448, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    As the RoboCup leagues evolve, higher requirements (e.g. object recognition skills) are imposed over the robot vision systems, which cannot be fulfilled using simple mechanisms as pure color segmentation or visual sonar. In this context the main objective of this article is to propose a robust object recognition system, based on the wide-baseline matching between a reference image (object model) and a test image where the object is searched. The wide baseline matching is implemented using local interest points and invariant descriptors. The proposed object recognition system is validated in two real-world tasks, recognition of objects in the RoboCup @Home league, and detection of robots in the humanoid league.

  63. Jesus Savage, Adalberto LLarena, Gerardo Carrera, Sergio Cuellar, David Esparza, Yukihiro Minami, and Ulises Peñuelas. Virbot: A system for the operation of mobile robots. In Ubbo Visser, Fernando Ribeiro, Takeshi Ohashi, and Frank Dellaert, editors, RoboCup 2007: Robot Soccer World Cup XI, pages 512–519, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    This paper describes a robotics architecture, the ViRbot, used to control the operation of service mobile robots. It accomplish the required commands using AI actions planning and reactive behaviors with a description of the working environment. In the ViRbot architecture the actions planner module uses Conceptual Dependency (CD) primitives as the base for representing the problem domain. After a command is spoken to the mobile robot a CD representation of it is generated, a rule based system takes this CD representation, and using the state of the environment generates other subtasks represented by CDs to accomplish the command. By using a good representation of the problem domain through CDs and a rule based system as an inference engine, the operation of the robot becomes a more tractable problem and easier to implement. The ViRbot system was tested in the Robocup@Home [1] category in the Robocup competition at Bremen, Germany in 2006 and in Atlanta in 2007, where our robot TPR8, obtained the third place in this category.

  64. V. Estivill-Castro and S. Seymon. Mobile robots for an e-mail interface for people who are blind. In Gerhard Lakemeyer, Elizabeth Sklar, Domenico G. Sorrenti, and Tomoichi Takahashi, editors, RoboCup 2006: Robot Soccer World Cup X, pages 338–346, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    The availability of inexpensive robotic hardware has brought to realization the dream of having autonomous mobile robots around us. As such, the research community has recently manifested more interest in assisting robotic technology (see proceedings of the last two IEEE RO-MAN conferences, the emergence of the RoboCup@Home challenge at RoboCup and the first annual Human Computer Interaction Conference jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACM). Robots provide to the blind what was lost as textual interfaces were replaced by GUIs. This paper describes the design, implementation and testing of a first prototype of a multi-modal Human-Robot Interface for people with Vision Impairment. The robot used is the commercially available four legged SONY Aibo.

  65. Tijn van der Zant and Thomas Wisspeintner. Robocup x: A proposal for a new league where robocup goes real world. In Ansgar Bredenfeld, Adam Jacoff, Itsuki Noda, and Yasutake Takahashi, editors, RoboCup 2005: Robot Soccer World Cup IX, pages 166–172, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    To put more emphasis on real-world problems, the authors propose to extend the RoboCup competitions. In order to foster progress in the desired abilities the authors propose to expand the existing challenges by a set of simple tests. The passing of the entire set should lead to robots that are capable of working both autonomously and in cooperation with humans in different realistic scenarios. Robots from all RoboCup leagues but also from outside of RoboCup should be allowed to participate. The new league especially aims at fostering the development of practical solutions and applications for supporting humans in everyday life.

  66. Raymond Sheh and Geoff West. Visual tracking and localization of a small domestic robot. In Daniele Nardi, Martin Riedmiller, Claude Sammut, and José Santos-Victor, editors, RoboCup 2004: Robot Soccer World Cup VIII, pages 410–417, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [ DOI | http ]

    We investigate the application of a Monte Carlo localization filter to the problem of combining local and global observations of a small, off-the-shelf quadruped domestic robot, in a simulated Smart House environment, for the purpose of robust tracking and localization. A Sony Aibo ERS-210A robot forms part of this project, with the ultimate aim of providing additional monitoring, human-system interaction and companionship to the occupants.

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