Autonomy for Off-road Vehicles
Karsten Berns, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany
Software- and Systems Architecture for Smart Vehicles
Cornel Klein, Siemens AG, Germany
Cooperative Motion Planning, Navigation, and Control of Multiple Autonomous Marine Vehicles - Robots and Humans in the Loop
António Pascoal, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
Vision-based Perception for Intelligent Vehicles
Alberto Broggi, VisLab - Universita' di Parma, Italy
Autonomy for Off-road Vehicles
Karsten Berns
University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
Germany
http://agrosy.informatik.uni-kl.de/
![]()
Brief Bio
Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns has studied computer science with a special focus on artificial intelligence at the University of Kaiserslautern (1982 to 1988). For his research on "Neural Networks for the Control of a six-legged Walking Machine" he received his PhD from the University of Karlsruhe in 1994. As head of the IDS (Interactive Diagnosis and Service Systems) department of the FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe (till 2003) he examined adaptive control concepts for different types of service robots. Since 2003 he is a full professor at the University of Kaiserslautern. Present research activities are the realization of reliable, complex autonomous robotic systems. Therefore, he and his research group are developing the robotic middleware Finroc, the behavior-based control architecture iB2C as well as different validation and verification methodologies. The main application is off-road robotics, in which autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles like small trucks, excavators, harvesters, tractors, and rescue robots are under development.Prof. Berns is frequently reviewer of several journals and robotic conferences. Furthermore, he is a member of a number of editorial boards. He also acts as reviewer for several national and international funding organizations. He is member of the IEEE, the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) and the CLAWAR Association. He is a member of the executive committee of the German Robotics Association (DGR) and is leader of the technical committee for robotic systems of the GI. He was Dean of the department of computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern (2007 – 2010) and is member of the scientific directorate Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics of the Dagstuhl Seminar. Currently, he is spokesperson of the Center for Commercial Vehicle Technology (ZNT) at the University of Kaiserslautern.
Abstract
In application areas like forestry, agriculture, construction or mining, the use of vehicles performing tasks in an autonomous or semi-autonomous manner will be more and more important. The efficiency according to the energy consumption and processing time, the quality of performing the tasks, and the reduction of cost play a major rule. Furthermore, there are several applications like demining, rescue operations, or demolition of nuclear power plants in which the health risks for human operators are very high. Up to now, several research groups from all over the world have developed autonomous or semi-autonomous research platforms for such types of applications. Main challenges are autonomous navigation in rough terrain, the perception and description of the unknown environment, and the implementation of an adequate control architecture. Starting with a short overview of the state of the art, the presentation will first focus on applying behavior-based strategies for a high adaptive and fault-tolerant control of off-road vehicles. Thereafter, several autonomous and semi-autonomous off-road vehicles like an excavator, a tractor, and a rescue robot will be discussed, which have been developed at the Robotics Research Lab of the University of Kaiserslautern for the last years.
Software- and Systems Architecture for Smart Vehicles
Cornel Klein
Siemens AG
Germany
Brief Bio
Cornel Klein is Research Program Manager within the Technology Field “Software and Systems Innovation” of Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich. He is current leading a corporate research program on validation and engineering of intelligent and autonomous systems. Starting his career 1998 at Siemens Public Networks, he held several leading and expert positions within the company and also represented Siemens in external partnerships like ITEA, ARTEMIS/ECSEL and SPES. He has gained an extensive knowledge in communications, cyber-physical and embedded systems, software- and systems engineering as well as in various application domains like automotive, mobility and smart cities/smart buildings. Cornel Klein holds a master and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.
Abstract
Both fully automated driving and electromobility are promising approaches to address the challenges of mobility with regards to sustainability, urbanization and demographic change. Moreover, they also change the usage patterns and concepts for future passenger vehicles and enable new kinds of applications for special purpose vehicles, for instance in logistics. Recently, many projects and demonstrators have shown the feasiblity and tremendous potential of driving automation for building such “Smart vehicles”. However, we are convinced that for the cost-effective development, validation and deployment of automation functions current vehicle architectures are insufficient. Therefore, we present results and research directions in software- and systems architectures. Moreover, we discuss their relevance for the efficient implementation of new vehicle functions and innovative applications.
Cooperative Motion Planning, Navigation, and Control of Multiple Autonomous Marine Vehicles - Robots and Humans in the Loop
António Pascoal
Instituto Superior Técnico
Portugal
http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt
![]()
Brief Bio
António M. Pascoal received the Ph.D. degree in Control Science from the Univ. Minnesota, Mpls, USA in 1987. From 1987-88 he was a Research Scientist with Integrated Systems Incorporated, Santa Clara, California. Since 1988 he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Lisbon, PT where he lectures in the areas of Control and Robotics. From 1996-1998 he was a Visiting Associate Professor with the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the US Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey, California. He is currently an Associate Professor of IST, a senior researcher with the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR)/Dynamical Systems and Ocean Robotics (DSOR) group, and coordinator of the Thematic Area “Technologies for Ocean Exploration and Exploitation” of the Associate Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS). Since 2012, he has been an Adjunct Scientist with the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Access, a new open access megajournal and a member of the Editorial Board of the Springer Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation Book Series. He was elected Chair, IFAC Technical Committee Marine Systems, from 2008-2014. He has coordinated and participated in a large number of international projects that have led to the design, development, and field-testing of single and multiple autonomous marine and air vehicles and systems in cooperation with partners in India (National Institute of Oceanography, Goa), USA (Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA), Korea (KAIST, Daejeon), and Europe. His research interests include Dynamical Systems Theory, Marine Robotics, Navigation, Guidance, and Control of Autonomous Vehicles, and Networked Control and Estimation with applications to air and underwater robots. He has published more than 300 journal and conference papers.WEBPAGES ISTISR-ISTLARSyS DSOR FacebookDSOR Projects
Abstract
This talk addresses the general topic of cooperative motion control of marine vehicles, both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint. The presentation is rooted in practical developments and experiments at sea. Examples of scientific mission scenarios with autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), acting alone or in cooperation, set the stage for the main contents of the presentation. From a theoretical standpoint, special attention is given to a number of challenging problems that include cooperative motion control and navigation of fleets of autonomous vehicles. The efficacy of the systems developed has been shown during real tests at sea. The connections with advanced methods for navigation, including geophysical-based navigation, are also discussed. Recent results on cooperative motion control with applications to the development of devices for robot-assisted human diving operations are described. The results are illustrated with videos from actual field tests with multiple marine robots and a diver in the loop. The core material presented in the talk was obtained in the scope of the GREX (http://www.grex-project.eu), CO3AUVs (http://www.co3-auvs.org), MORPH (http://morph-project.eu/), and CADDY (http://www.caddy-fp7.eu/) projects of the EC.
Vision-based Perception for Intelligent Vehicles
Alberto Broggi
VisLab - Universita' di Parma
Italy
Brief Bio
Prof. Alberto Broggi received the Dr. Ing. (Master) degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Information Technology both from the Universita` di Parma, Italy. He is now Full Professor at the Universita` di Parma and the President of VisLab, the Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory.
As a pioneer in the use of machine vision for automotive applications and on driverless cars, he authored of more than 150 publications on international scientific journals, book chapters, refereed conference proceedings. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems for the term 2004-2008; he served the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society as President for the term 2010-2011. He is recipient of two ERC (European Research Council) prestigious grants.
Abstract
The keynote will focus on the latest developments in terms of perception on board of vehicles. Many prototype vehicles have been design and implemented worldwide, each with its own sensor suite; vision is playing an ever increasing role since cameras performance is improving year after year and processing power is becoming available at a low cost.
The presentation will highlight the benefits of using vision as the main perception technology and will describe some ongoing experiments on full 360-degree 3D reconstruction in real time.