Work and projects

Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg

MigrAVE (2021-)

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.

b-it (2020-)

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:

• Teaching support in various courses in the program
• Regular activities related to the the b-it-bots@Home team (see below)
• Organisation of a regular PhD seminar for the PhD students in the Autonomous Systems Group (that, of course, includes myself)
• Co-organisation of the foundations course for new students of the master’s program
• Maintenance of various student-related workflows, particularly those performed over LEA, the university’s course management system

b-it-bots@Home (2017-)

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:

• mas_domestic_robotics - our primary robot-independent domestic robotics repository
• mas_execution_manager - a library for (i) specifying reusable state machine-based scenarios and (ii) defining various common interfaces for implementing robot behaviours
• mas_knowledge_base - a library that (i) exposes an rdflib-based interface for interacting with OWL ontologies and (ii) provides a wrapper for the ROSPlan knowledge base as well as mongodb_store
• action-execution - an under-development package that allows creating simple models of action execution-specific aspects
• a collection of tutorials for using the functionalities we develop in the team

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:

• our black box components (the data logging component as well as a library for working with black box data)
• a component monitoring library
• a library for defining and managing robot experiments
• a web application for remote robot operation monitoring and diagnosis
• a library for implementing fault-tolerant state machines
• components for elevator navigation (a component for managing the workflow of taking an elevator and a component for detecting floor changes using pressure sensor measurements)
• generic common interfaces for communication and component implementation
• a Gazebo-based OpenAI gym environment for the ropod
• a Python-based task planner and knowledge base interface

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

• utilities for calibrating smart wheels
• a simple component that aligns a robot with a corner as soon as it starts drifting away (this has been useful for letting our robot perform simple motions, such as moving in a circle - for prolonged periods of time without worrying that it will drift away from a designated area)

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.