Since the end of 2020, I am a half-time research associate in the MigrAVE project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In this project, I lead the development of a robot assistant for treatment of children who have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where our target group includes children who may come from a family with a migration background. In contrast to some of my other projects, this one has a stronger focus on social robotics and is considerably more interdisciplinary.
The components we are developing in the project are available on GitHub.
Since the beginning of 2020, I work as a half-time research associate in the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (b-it). In particular, I am an assistant to the b-it director at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, such that my colleagues and I manage and organise the Master of Autonomous Systems program. My position is a good mixture of administrative duties and research activities primarily related to my PhD project. Some of my activities in this position include:
Since roughly the summer of 2017, I am 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 focus on various aspects in the team, but my primary activities are knowledge engineering and system integration. There is an overlap of what I do 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 and is now out of order.
I get to contribute to various open-source projects here, particularly:
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:
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.
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.