Behavior coordination for reusable system design in interactive robotics

Siepmann F. Behavior coordination for reusable system design in interactive robotics. Bielefeld: Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld; 2013.Robotic systems research is typically a result of a collaborative engineering process in an environment of rapidly changing technologies. It involves a large number of hardware and software components, each of which are problem solutions for differ- ent challenges from different research areas. Systems for Human-Robot Interaction face the additional challenge of having to actually work together with humans in a shared environment. Despite the fact that some single capabilities needed to solve various tasks with robotic systems are well established, however, robots frequently fail when they need to combine these capabilities and demonstrate them in a complex real world scenario. The aspect of coordinating and efficiently combining robots capabilities is one area where robots still fail. The focus of this work is to provide a framework for developers of interactive robot systems that perform in domestic environments, which allows the combina- tion and improvement of building blocks of the robot behavior based on experience gained in real world interaction and make the combination and coordination of these building-blocks easier and more easily reusable for developers. With the framework developed during this thesis there where many occasions where a robot platform was evaluated in a real world environment. This iterative design process documented here helps to answer questions about how to improve the robot performance based on observations from real world interactions, how to enable re-usability of robot behavior building blocks across scenarios and plat- forms and how to combine and coordinate the different robot capabilities from a developers point of view

ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2009

Wachsmuth S, Hanheide M, Siepmann F, Spexard T. ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2009. Graz, Austria; 2009.The ToBI robocup team has been newly founded in Jan 2009 in order to proceed existing long-term research in the development of robot companions for domestic environments towards new challenges in more standardized benchmarking procedures, like RoboCup@Home. The main features of the ToBI system are a flexibile Active Memory-based architecture that enables the fast integration of new processing modules and new system behaviors and the modeling of mixed-initiative strategies for multi-modal dialog. The overall goal is an out-of-the-box robot that is able to successfully interact with na¨ ıve users. In this paper we describe the technical basis on which the ToBI system is based and give some insights on previous evaluation experiences

ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2010

Wachsmuth S, Siepmann F, Schulze D, Swadzba A. ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2010.; 2010.The Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) has been founded in 2009. The robocup activities are embedded in a long-term research history towards human-robot interaction with laypersons in regular home envi- ronments. The robocup@home competition is an important benchmark and milestone for the overall research goal. For robocup 2010, the team concentrates on mixed-initiative scenarios, person detection capabilities, and more sophisticated scene understanding methods

ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2013

Ziegler L, Wittrowski J, Schöpfer M, Siepmann F, Wachsmuth S. ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2013.; 2013.The Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) has been founded in 2009. The RoboCup activities are embedded in a long-term research history towards human-robot interaction with laypersons in regular home environments. The RoboCup@Home competition is an important benchmark and milestone for the overall research goal. For RoboCup 2013, the team concentrates on an easy to use programming environment, semantically annotated maps and deeper scene analysis via Implicit Shape Models

ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2012

Wachsmuth S, Siepmann F, Ziegler L, Lier F, Schöpfer M. ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2012.; 2012.The Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) has been founded in 2009. The RoboCup activities are embedded in a long-term research history towards human-robot interaction with laypersons in regular home envi- ronments. The RoboCup@Home competition is an important benchmark and milestone for the overall research goal. For RoboCup 2012, the team concentrates on mixed-initiative scenarios, a generic interaction-pattern based dialog, an easy to use programming environment and semantically annotated maps

ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2011

Wachsmuth S, Siepmann F, Ziegler L, Lier F. ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2011.; 2011.The Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) was founded in 2009. The robocup activities are embedded in a long-term research history towards human-robot interaction with laypersons in regular home environments. The robocup@home competition is an important benchmark and mile- stone for the overall research goal. For robocup 2011, the team concen- trates on mixed-initiative scenarios, sophisticated scene understanding methods including semantically annotated maps, and an easy to use pro- gramming environment

A modeling framework for user-driven iterative design of autonomous systems

Many researchers in human-robot interaction have acknowledged the fact that iterative design is necessary to optimize the robots for the interaction with the users. However, few iterative user studies have been reported. We believe that one reason for this is that setting up systems for iterative studies is cumbersome because the system architectures do not support iterative design. In the paper, we address this problem by interlinking usability research with system development. In a first user study, we identify requirements and concepts for a new framework that eases the employment of autonomous robots in the iterative design process. With a second user study we show how robot behaviors are implemented in the new framework and how it enables the developer to efficiently make changes to these behaviors

A Memory-based Software Integration for Development in Autonomous Robotics

Spexard TP, Siepmann F, Sagerer G. A Memory-based Software Integration for Development in Autonomous Robotics. In: International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems. Baden-Baden, Germany; 2008: 49-53.Focusing the development of non-industrial robotics in the last decade the growing impact of service and entertainment robots for daily life has developed from pure science fiction to a serious scientific subject. Beginning with the first approaches of tour guide robots with poor cognitive abilities in museums or huge office building nowadays sociable robots operating in households are in sight of scientists. But still many questions in how to solve everyday tasks like laying the table or even ’’simpler’’ detecting objects in unstructured areas with varying lighting conditions are unsolved. Therefore the strong need to evaluate and exchange different approaches and abilities of multiple robotic demonstrators under real world conditions is also a crucial aspect in the development of system architectures. In this paper an architecture will be described providing strong support for simple exchange and integration of new robot abilities

Towards an Informed Search Behavior for Domestic Robots

Ziegler L, Siepmann F, Kortkamp M, Wachsmuth S. Towards an Informed Search Behavior for Domestic Robots. In: Proceedings of SIMPAR 2010 Workshops. 2010: 241-250.In this paper we present an object search behavior for a mobile domestic robot that reduces the search space by applying a novel kind of spatial attention system. Different visual cues are mapped in a SLAM-like manner in order to identify hypotheses for possible object locations. These locations are scanned for known objects using a recognition method consisting of two complementary pathways - a detector measuring color distributions and a classifier using a SVM with a Pyramid Matching Kernel. We show the usefulness of the proposed approach by conducting an evaluation in a real world apartment scenario

Deploying a modeling framework for reusable robot behavior to enable informed strategies for domestic service robots

Siepmann F, Ziegler L, Kortkamp M, Wachsmuth S. Deploying a modeling framework for reusable robot behavior to enable informed strategies for domestic service robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems. 2014;62(5):619-631.For the development of multi-purpose robots that can operate in a wide range of different situations we will need sophisticated behavioral building blocks to compose the desired performances. In this paper we argue for a behavior modeling framework which provides specific behavior interfaces for implementing robot skills that stay close to evaluation cycles and to rich fused sensory data. This way we ensure reusability and facilitate what we call Informed Strategies. As a specific application we deploy the framework to an object search task for a domestic service robot. The presented behavior involves an attention mapping mechanism based on 2D and 3D visual cues. We show the advantages of the proposed approach by conducting an evaluation in a real-world apartment scenario as well as by successfully taking part in the RoboCup@HOME competition