Department of Computer Science Technische Universitaet Muenchen
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Ongoing research projects
CogMaSh - Cognitive Machine Shop
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CogMaSh is a part of the TUM Excellence Initiative cluster CoTeSys and aims at elevating the until now applied techniques which make Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) out of ordinary Production Plants. The break-through concept that we want to apply comes behind the word Cognition, i.e. the flexibility, adaptivity and generality in FMSes will be reached through human-like perception, reasoning, learning, adapting and process planning. That particular FMS shall in aftermath autonomously cope with different context scenarios and situations, assure sufficient safety issues and after all significantly reduce production costs.

In my work I am dealing with sensory embodied in suchlike FMSes which gives rise to intelligent perception paradigms and provides grounds for better and above all certain reasoning of going-on actions. Image on the left hand side shows our two testbed setups, a real-hardware FMS as installed by provider, and in the right part of the image, an in-house built-up FMS using the Gazebo 3D simulator (work of Thomas Ruehr). My work is currently concentrated around the latter one because it allows for unrestricted access to FMS's kinematics and control structures as oppose to the proprietary software driving the real FMS.

In Gazebo, I am currently extracting the infrastructure by building-up such models as the below shown RA01 robotic arm which is to be in the future manufactured by our FMS all alone. In addition I am/will be also providing Player drivers and belonging functionalities of the sensors in use. In the middle-term run I aim at estimating the probabilistic state of the FMS, reason based on the outcome combined with the past knowledge and undertake the corrective actions if needed. The production processes run in the plan-based manner (using Reactive Plan Language) and have the ability to get transformed in order to improve their efficiency.


Relevant publications
  • Thomas Ruehr, Dejan Pangercic, and Michael Beetz. Structured Reactive Controllers and Transformational Planning for Manufacturing. In Proceedings of The 13th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), Hamburg, Germany, September 15-18, 2008. [PDF]

Monocular 3D SLAM for Indoor Environments
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Under the shared supervisory of Radu Bogdan Rusu, Marko Munih and Michael Beetz I wrote my Master Thesis on 3D-based monocular SLAM and applied it to the Assistive Kitchen environment. The abstract right under here as well as the PDF and the final movie of the work in thesis done are all available below.

Visual 3D SLAM (vSLAM) is inarguably the red-hot trend in probabilistic robotics. By answering the two key robot-questions of where I am, and where I am going, it solves the famous SLAM 'chicken-egg' problem. The paid-off of using vision as an only outward-directed robot sense is in that it utilizes camera inherent properties to return very intuitive and well-understood information. As such it outperforms any kind of other sensors (laser, odometry, sonar). The work done in this thesis tackles with vSLAM using only one camera which is attached to an omnidirectional robot and delivers eight bit, monochrome images. The robot operates in an assistive kitchen environment, which is artificially cluttered to enrich its texture. A sparse map in 3D space of the rich-texture features of size 11 × 11 pixels is being built by using an Extended Kalman Filter state-estimator, while robot moves and concurrently uses this map for the navigation. The important challenge, solved in this work, is a feature 3D depth estimation using a 1D Particle Depth Estimation algorithm, which after all enables the utilization of the monocular camera. The algorithm currently SLAMs table-size volumes and runs in realtime on the standard laptop machine. The underlying essence of this work is in its mathematical inductions that perfectly discuss robot motion model and measurement model transformations and respective covariances. Applied measurement model is a novel approach and has been completely developed by us.

VIDEO:


Relevant publications
Past/finished researched projects

7IR - Seven Days of Industrial Robotics
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As a member of the EESTEC association I, when I was still an undergraduate student, together with ROBO Laboratory, companies Motoman and ABB organized a break-through week-event on industrial robotics intended for the freshman and sophomore students at the FE Ljubljana. Practical tutorials on a)joint robot-robot actions, b)pick and place and screw robot-vision tasks, c)planning robot's trajectories and understanding its forward and inverse kinematics, d)off-line simulator programming and all that topped with the e)robot soccer tactical assignment were a definite GO for Robotics studies in the number of participating students. A collection of tutorial instructions prefaced with an excellent introduction to the industrial robotics world is available below.
Relevant publications

Wishbone Interface Standard Show-Down - Bachelor Thesis
http://www.opencores.org.uk/projects.cgi/web/wishbone/
The WISHBONE System-on-Chip (SoC) Interconnect Architecture for Portable IP Cores is a portable interface for use with semiconductor IP cores. Its purpose is to foster design reuse by alleviating system-on-a-chip integration problems. This is accomplished by creating a common, logical interface between IP cores. This improves the portability and reliability of the system, and results in faster time-to-market for the end user. WISHBONE itself is not an IP core...it is a specification for creating IP cores.

I had a chance to work on the standard during my Bachelor Thesis at the Laboratory for Integrated Circuit Design under the supervisory of Andrej Trost, whom I still owe incredibly much for bearing with me the green I was and setting me on the track of research.

The thesis itself was the Laboratory's pilot project and therefore merely theoretically exploited standard's prominence in unifying the SoC Intellectual Property Modules. A simple point-to-point connection between a slave-transmitter module and a display-receiver module was set up in order to demonstrate standard's usability on the Altera family FPGAs. Due to the slovene text in the thesis it is not available here, however, I will be happy to answer any question related to the scope of the thesis.

My Undergrad Projects
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For the list of Projects (and more) I did during my studies at the TUM and FE please visit my personal website.

Computer Science IX | Technische Universität München