News
Requests for bachelor and master theses are welcome at any
time. We have built an environment with two levels connected by a
spiral staircase for our humanoid robot and have a lot of interesting
work to do.
Maren Bennewitz is gender equality representative
(Gleichstellungsbeauftragte) of the Faculty of Engineering. If you
have any questions regarding this topic, please drop an E-Mail.
May 2013
- Olivier Stasse and Maren Bennewitz are guest editors of a special
issue on Motion Planning
and Navigation with Humanoids of the International Journal of
Humanoid Robotics. Submission deadline: June 14.
May 2013
- Michael Zillich, Maren Bennewitz, Maria Fox, Justus Piater, and Dejan Pangercic are jointly organizing a workshop on Robots
in Clutter: Preparing Robots for the Real World at RSS 2013 in June.
May 2013
- Our whole group will be at ICRA 2013 in Karlsruhe from May 6-10. Maren Bennewitz and Olivier
Stasse are jointly organizing a workshop on Progress and
Open Problems in Motion Planning and Navigation for
Humanoids at the conference.
May 2013
- Armin Hornung will give a tutorial about 3D Mapping with OctoMap
at ROSCon 2013 and give an
invited presentation about our work on whole-body motion planning at
the ICRA 2013 workshop on Motion
Planning for Mobile Manipulation: State-of-the-art Methods and
Tools.
April 2013
- Our FP7-Call-10 IP proposal has been evaluated with 14/15 points and
will be funded by the EC! Within this project we will develop
techniques for robots to clean up children's rooms in close
interaction with the children.
April 2013
- New release of our octree-based mapping library: OctoMap 1.6 with new features and improved performance (full changelog).
March 2013
- Felix Burget started as Ph.D. student in our lab and Aaron Klein joins
us as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
February 2013
- Our EU FP7 project ROVINA starts.
January 2013
- Our articles "OctoMap: An Efficient Probabilistic 3D Mapping Framework
Based on Octrees" and "Vision-based Humanoid Navigation Using Self-Supervised
Obstacle Detection" have been accepted for publication in the Autonomous
Robots Journal and in the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics.
December 2012
- Our work is highlighted in a German magazine article about robotics together with
the work of Cynthia Breazeal and Hiroshi Ishiguro!
December 2012
- Merry Christmas! Listen to our Nao playing Jingle Bells on a Glockenspiel.
December 2012
- Our robots are the top story at the
university's homepage. Read
this article on Surprising
Science, the science portal of the University of Freiburg.
November 2012
- We are invited to give a presentation about our work on Search-Based Footstep Planning at the Workshop on Humanoid Soccer Robots at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots in Osaka.
November 2012
- Jeremias Holub joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
October 2012
- Stefan Oßwald was awarded the VDI-Förderpreis
for his Master's thesis on Techniques for Autonomous Stair Climbing
with Humanoid Robots.
October 2012
- Our Nao conducted the University Big Band at the new
students' welcome party in the Freiburger SC stadium. Watch this video
and see this
picture of the event. Also have a look at the article in the Badische Zeitung.
October 2012
- New package humanoid_localization
available in the humanoid_navigation stack. It enables Monte Carlo
localization in a 3D OctoMap based on laser, odometry, and IMU data to
estimate the full 6D torso pose of a humanoid.
September 2012
- Our Nao is able to perform object manipulation tasks involving
whole-body motions: Opening a
drawer, opening a door, and grabbing an
object from a shelf. Paper submitted to ICRA...
August 2012
- Technology Review features an interview with Maren Bennewitz about
human-like robots.
August 2012
- New release of our octree-based mapping
library: OctoMap 1.5. Along with
the 3D visualization tool "octovis", the octomap distribution now also
includes "dynamicEDT3D", a library for dynamically updatable 3D distance
maps by C. Sprunk, B. Lau, and W. Burgard.
August 2012
- Armin Hornung will give a lecture about "3D Mapping with OctoMap" at the ROS RoboCup Rescue Summerschool.
July 2012
- Our FP7-Call-9 proposal ROVINA has been accepted for funding by the EC.
July 2012
- Our Nao is able to walk down ramps autonomously. This video shows the Nao walking down a 2.10m long ramp at an inclination of 20 degrees.
July 2012
- Ramin Zohouri joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
June 2012
- Our proposal for the Cluster of Excellence BrainLinks-BrainTools
has been awarded.
June 2012
- Maren Bennewitz will give an invited presentation about our
research on humanoid navigation at the German-French
workshop on Perspectives on Cognitive Interaction and Technology.
May 2012
- Maren Bennewitz was invited to join the Editorial Board of the
Journal of AI Research.
May 2012
- Igor Bogoslavskyi joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
May 2012
- Armin Hornung will give a tutorial about ROS for Humanoid Robots
at ROSCon 2012.
March 2012
- Our imitation video was elected for the second place of the best video
award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot
Interaction!
March 2012
- Felix Burget joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
February 2012
- New release of the octree-based mapping
library: OctoMap 1.4, along with the
updated octomap_mapping ROS stack for electric.
January 2012
- Winfried Kretschmann, the prime minister of the State
Baden-Württemberg, visited our Faculty. We gave a demonstration of
our stair climbing robot, which he
seemed to like. Have a look at the articles in the Badische Zeitung
and Bild.
December 2011
- Our new Nao-H25 v4 arrived! This video shows its
first steps...
November 2011
- Tobias Domhan joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
October 2011
- We released an update of our footstep planner
in the ROS humanoid_navigation stack. The planner is now much faster and builds on SBPL. In addition to the previous D* Lite implementation, this now enables anytime (re-)planning, e.g., with ARA* or AD*.
October 2011
- Maren Bennewitz will give an invited presentation about our work on humanoid
navigation at the Humamoids 2011 workshop on Humanoid service robot
navigation in crowded and dynamic environments, October 26th, 2011 Bled, Slovenia.
September 2011
- Our Nao was in CBSNEWS Creepy but cool: robots that climb stairs,
fly and fight like Jedis (start at 1'30 min). Here is the
link to a local copy of the video.
September 2011
- We will present our stair-climbing Nao at
the IROS 2011 demonstration
session, September 27-29, in San Francisco.
August 2011
- We moved to new office space in building 074! Students are welcome
to visit the lab at any time. In case the outer doors are closed, just
call 97951, 97950, or 97949 from the main entry, which is at the end
of the parking lot.
July 2011
- This video shows our Nao humanoid imitating whole-body motions of humans almost in real time!
March 2011
- Our Nao autonomously climbs up spiral staircases! Check this video.
March 2011
- Armin Hornung and Kai Wurm released the
stable version 1.0 of the
octree-based mapping
library OctoMap. A new version of
the octomap_mapping
stack for ROS is also available.
February 2011
- We developed an approach to efficient, optimal footstep planning for humanoid
robots. We formulate the problem of footstep planning so that it
can be solved with the incremental heuristic search method D*
Lite. See this webpage for further details. Our D* Lite algorithm for footstep
planning is available as open source
implementation as part of the Robot Operating System (ROS).
December 2010
- Johannes Garimort joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
November 2010 - Armin Hornung and Kai Wurm released a new
version of the OctoMap
library, which is an efficient, compact 3D map representation. In
this improved version, map building and queries on the map are carried
out significantly faster. It is also available
as package for
ROS.
November 2010
- Our SFB/TR8 Spatial
Cognition will be funded for another four years by the
DFG.
November 2010
- Daniel Maier joins the lab as Ph.D. student.
October 2010
- Jonas Koenemann joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
June 2010
- We developed a 6D localization system for humanoid robots. It is based
on 2D laser data in a given 3D model of the environment and yields
highly accurate estimates even in complex indoor environments. Here is a
video with
simulation and real robot experiments. The laser head for the Nao
humanoid was developeed
by Aldebaran
Robotics in cooperation with our lab.
May 2010
- Our Nao robot is able to imitate
human motions (Jonas Koenemann's bachelor's thesis). Video coming soon!
April 2010
- Our article "Efficient Vision-based Navigation - Learning about the
Influence of Motion Blur" has been accepted for publication in the Autonomous Robots journal.
March 2010
- Armin Hornung provides drivers
and software to integrate the Nao robot
into ROS, which is a
free and open source robot operating system developed by
Willow Garage.
March 2010
- We published a video showing our laser-equipped Nao robot climbing up a staircase with steps of 7cm height!
January 2010
- Daniel Maier and Stefan Oßwald join the lab as part-time assistants (Hiwis).
October 2009
- Armin Hornung receives the VDI-Förderpreis 2009 for his thesis
on "Learning Policies for Reliable Mobile Robot Localization"!
September 2009
- Our proposal "Humanoid Robot Navigation in Complex Indoor
Environments" has been accepted! Now, we are part of the
SFB/TR8 Spatial
Cognition. For our research, we will use the laser-equipped Nao
developeed by Aldebaran
Robotics in cooperation with our lab.
August 2009
- Our Nao robot is able to climb stairs with a height of 7cm! See
these
pictures: 1,
2, 3,
and 4.
June 2009
- Our Nao robot met the German minster for education
and science, Mrs. Annette Schavan, during her visit at the Faculty of
Engineering. Here ist a picture of the event.
March 2009
- Our Nao robot
from Aldebaran
Robotics has just arrived!
March 2009
- Maren Bennewitz will give an invited presentation about our work on "Learning
Efficient Policies for Vision-based Navigation" at the ICRA'09
Workshop Visual Mapping and Navigation in Outdoor Environments.
March 2009
- Attila Görög joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).
February 2009
- Armin
Hornung joins the lab as Ph.D. student.
October 2008
- Christian
Plagemann designed our new logo.
October 2008 - The lab has been founded.
