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.
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.
January 2012
- Our two papers were accepted for publication
at ICRA 2012.
January 2012
- Armin Hornung's tutorial about ROS for Humanoid Robots was accepted
at ROSCon 2012.
December 2011
- Merry Christmas! This video shows our Nao playing
Gingle Bells on a xylophone.
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
- We will give an invited presentation about our work on humnaoid
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
- We 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.
