Jan Koch

Indoor Localisation of Humans, Objects, and mobile Robots with RFID Infrastructure

The need for robust indoor localisation for all types of entities has been under continuous research by the ubiquitous community. Intelligent environments have to be supported with contextual information in order to facilitate intelligent behaviour. These contextual information include the location of humans and objects within the particular environment. Intelligent environments can be living areas with home automation, smart industrial plants, sensor-equipped office areas and indoor-emergency applications. So far technical solutions are either quite expensive or lack of precision for robust usage as components in intelligent service federations. We present rather low-cost localisation systems with great scalability based on active and passive RFID technology to locate humans, mobile service robots and objects of the daily use. The trade-off between technical effort and costs on the one hand and sufficient data accuracy for the application on the other hand is discussed. A motivation of our scenario, the technical concept and solution as well as the implementation and the integration that so far have been performed will be presented. Current prototypes of the proposed system are already being tested in a project aiming on development of smart assisted living environments.

Engineering Tele-Health Solutions in the Ambient Assisted Living Lab

Despite the advancement in electronic industry and the high potential of ambient intelligence applications in the domain of tele-health, the task of engineering such systems is non-trivial and convincing solutions are still missing. The engineering challenges to cope with and the inappropriateness of current engineering methods and research approaches complicate the process of tele-health system development. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to list the current research challenges for tele-health systems from an engineering perspective and (ii) to show how we approach the challenges by means of an assisted living laboratory for engineering and evaluation purposes.

Methodology for robot mapping and navigation in assisted living environments

Robust navigation in living environments demands high requirements on the control system of a robot. Due to typically narrow passages between obstacles, precise navigation is required. To achieve accuracy in navigation, detailed representation of the environment around the robot needs to be developed. Robust and precise mapping of the environment helps in overcoming the dynamics in the living environment like movement of furniture and human beings. Prompt recovery from unreachable paths while navigating is also an essential component of the living environment robots. This paper describes a behaviour-based navigation system in assisted living environments. The navigation system uses a grid map created from data obtained from laser scanner and ultrasonic sensors mounted on a small sized robot, ARTOS. ARTOS is specially designed for indoor living environments able to navigate through narrow corridors and closely placed furniture in the living environment.

Inertial navigation for wheeled robots in outdoor terrain

The implementation of an inertial measurement system used within the behavior-based control of an autonomous outdoor vehicle is presented in this paper. Autonomous dead-reckoning navigation can be substantially improved by an inertial sensor system. The determined orientation information is also mandatory for higher level behavior-based control to allow path-finding adaptive to the environment.

Fault-Tolerant 3D Localization for Outdoor Vehicles

This paper presents a robust Kalman-based localization for outdoor vehicles. Outdoor vehicles require a fault-tolerant system that can manage temporary unavailable sensor measurements. The sensor system of the vehicle consists of odometry, inertial measurement unit (IMU) and differential global positioning system (DGPS) receiver. The system allows full 3D localization including position, attitude and velocities. Final experiments showed the localization and navigation capabilities of the outdoor robot RAVON

Universal web interfaces for robot control frameworks

Developers and end-users have to interface robotic systems for control and feedback. Such systems are typically co-engineered with their graphical user interfaces. In the past, a vast community of researchers has addressed issues of generality, deployment, usability, and re-usability of user interfaces. However, the support for creating graphical user interfaces in recent robotic frameworks is limited. In particular, there is typically no support for Web-based teleoperation. In this work, we propose a new Java-based editor with a plugin architecture for GUI elements and communication ports. Special focus is laid on platform-independent design, easy extensibility, connectivity to different robotic frameworks, usability and deployment. The tool offers convenient creation of graphical user interfaces and can publish them over the Web - making them accessible from any Java-enabled Web browser.

Indoor-Simulation of Team Training in Cycling

For the single cyclist performance parameters such as power, speed, or heart rate can be monitored during training and competition. Although cycling is primarily a single sport, riding in groups is a very common in training. An ambient intelligence system has been developed for the training of a group of cyclists. The objective of this system is to improve team training such that each cyclist is as close to his individual exercise intensity as possible. Besides physiological and biomechanical data, subjective sensations are also considered. The focus of this paper is on feedback training. Based on the comparison of dynamically collected status data and set values, the feedback training system adjusts training parameters, for instance by advising the group to change the order or the formation, to increase or decrease the speed, or to split the group. In a final version, the system should run under outdoor conditions. As an intermediate step, a prototype for indoor training was established.

Dynamic Speech Interaction for Robotic Agents

Research in mobile service robotics aims on development of intuitive speech interfaces for human-robot interaction. We see a service robot as a part of an intelligent environment and want to step forward discussing a concept where a robot does not only offer its own features via natural speech interaction but also becomes a transactive agent featuring other services’ interfaces. The provided framework makes provisions for the dynamic registration of speech interfaces to allow a loosely-coupled flexible and scalable environment. An intelligent environment can evolve out of multimedia devices, home automation, communication, security, and emergency technology. These appliances offer typical wireless or stationary control interfaces. The number of different control paradigms and differently lay-outed control devices gives a certain border in usability. As speech interfaces offer a more natural way to interact intuitively with technology we propose to centralize a general speech engine on a robotic unit. This has two reasons: The acceptance to talk to a mobile unit is estimated to be higher rather than to talk to an ambient system where no communication partner is visible. Additionally the devices or functionalities to be controlled in most cases do not provide a speech interface but offer only proprietary access.

Mobile Robot Navigation Support in Living Environments

Navigation and application functionality of mobile robots rely on their collision-avoiding capabilities, also known as local navigation. We present the mobile robot ARTOS (Autonomous Robot for Transport and Service) that is particularly designed to operate in living environments and therefore faces the problem of fuzzy and unstructured obstacles. The local navigation architecture is motivated regarding decisions on sensor hardware setup as well as the software layers that support and influence navigation control.

Using an autonomous robot to maintain privacy in assistive environments

In our societies, the number of senior citizens living on their own is increasing steadily. The lack of permanent attention results in the late detection of emergency situations. Labour-intensive care is already a high burden for the society; therefore, it seems reasonable to promote technology that helps to detect and react in case of emergency situations that elderly people may encounter. In the last decade, assistive environments have been established by integrating surveillance devices into the living environments giving remote operators access to monitor the senior inhabitant at home for detecting emergency situations. However, due to poor privacy in terms of intrusion into the private life of an elderly person, there will be an unfavourably low acceptance of such systems. This paper introduces a two-stage strategy and proposes to replace a possibly large number of human-controlled monitoring devices by a single autonomous mobile system. The first stage will be performed by the autonomous system to detect an emergency situation. The human operator will be obligatory only at the final stage when the system assumes that an emergency has occurred and the final evaluation of the situation is required. The self-assessment will reduce the human factor related to privacy issues. Copyright