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Work and projects

Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg

Lecturer (2023-)

Since October 2023, I have a lecturer position in the Institute for AI and Autonomous Systems at H-BRS. Here, I teach various courses in the Master of Autonomous Systems program, in particular two mandatory courses (Autonomous Mobile Robots and Software Engineering for Robotics), as well as two elective courses (Robot Learning and Cognitive Robotics). My course materials can be found here.

In addition to my teaching duties, I still maintain a subset of my duties in b-it (see below), in particular the co-organisation of the foundations course, the PhD seminar organisation, as well as the maintenance of some student-related workflows.

MigrAVE (2021-2023)

Between the end of 2020 and 2023, I worked as a half-time research associate in the MigrAVE project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In this project, I was leading the development of a robot assistant for treatment of children who have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where our target group included children who may come from a family with a migration background. In contrast to some of my other projects, this one had a stronger focus on social robotics and was considerably more interdisciplinary; particularly the interdisciplinarity has been quite useful for expanding my research focus to aspects dealing with human-robot collaboration, and concretely robot personalisation.

The components we developed in the project are available on GitHub, and videos illustrating various components developed during the work can be found on our YouTube channel.

b-it (2020-2023)

Between the beginning of 2020 and October 2023, I worked as a half-time research associate in the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (b-it). In particular, I was an assistant to the b-it director at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, such that my colleagues and I managed and organised the Master of Autonomous Systems program. My position was a good mixture of administrative duties and research activities primarily related to my PhD project. Some of my activities in this position included:

b-it-bots@Home (2017-2022)

Since roughly the summer of 2017 roughly until I completed my PhD, I was part of the b-it-bots@Home team at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (I was team co-leader until February 2019, but had to step down for a few months due to time constraints, although I continued again in September 2019). I was focusing on various aspects in the team, but my primary activities were knowledge engineering and system integration. There was an overlap of what I was doing in the team and my PhD.

At the beginning of 2018, we acquired a Toyota HSR robot, such that I oversee most of the activities with this robot. For a while, I was trying to work with our old Care-O-bot 3 as well, but unfortunately that one got broken.

I have developed and contributed to various open-source projects here, particularly:

ROPOD (2017-2020)

Between 2017 and April 2020, I was a half-time research associate in the ROPOD EU-funded project (the final review of the project was on April 23, 2020). My primary work was in a work package focusing on fault detection and fault tolerance; in this context, my colleagues and I were working on data logging (in particular, a concept for a so-called robotic black box), component and system monitoring, as well as remote monitoring, experimentation, and diagnosis. I also got to do quite a bit of testing with the ROPOD platform. Additionally, I was involved in task planning and a fair amount of system integration.

Most of the components that we have developed in the project are open-source; of these, I was personally mostly involved in the development of:

During the project, I also developed various minor tools that have been useful in different contexts:

beyondSPAI (2016)

After finishing my master’s thesis in 2016, I was briefly involved in the beyondSPAI project. My main activity here was performing a comparative analysis of (mostly learning-based) person detection and segmentation models and identifying candidate models that can use skin masks as additional source of information that aids the detection process.

AICISS (2014-2015)

During part of my master’s studies, I worked on the AICISS project, where I mostly worked on fault detection (which was also my R&D project during my studies). We worked with a KUKA youBot in this project, such that I looked into wheel fault detection, using a camera observation system for keeping the robot inside a predefined safe region, using fault injection for diagnosing laser scanner and wheel faults, as well as implementing a custom-made data logger.

This was the first larger robotics project I was involved in, so I gained a lot of invaluable experience in it.