Demonstrator Engineering

DE is one important factor for the development of concepts, solutions and implementations of demonstrator-systems, comprising everything from building to maintenance and operation. This results in demonstrators that can be used by many different research groups, e.g. to examine human factors in HRI or to develop applications and/or prototypes for new interactive systems. The CLF has developed a number of software tools that support developers of multi-purpose robotic systems to easily program complex behavior in particular for the developers who are no experts in any specific detail of the robot's software components. The continuous development and evaluation of the systems within the CLF also enables the implementation of improvements gained through e.g. user studies resulting in reusable behavior-patterns for various demonstrators and scenarios.

A panorama view of the robot lab.

Team of Bielefeld (ToBI), RoboCup@HOME platform

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 overall research goal is to provide a robot with capabilities that enable the interactive teaching of skills and tasks through natural communication in previously unknown environments. 
The challenge is two-fold. On the one hand, we need to understand the communicative cues of humans and how they interpret robotic behavior. On the other hand, we need to provide technology that is able to perceive the environment, detect and recognize humans, navigate in changing environments, localize and manipulate objects, initiate and understand a spoken dialog. Thus, it is important to go beyond typical command-style interaction and to support mixed-initiative learning tasks. The RoboCup team ToBI is supported by the CLF, providing, maintaining and extending the hardware platform as well as the programming environment and a number of software components of the robot system. The team manly consists of (under-)graduate students that change every year. Hence the CLF introduces interested students to the platform and the software to prepare them for working with robots and give them a detailed insight into real world robot scenarios and a lot of practical experience.

Humanoid Robot Head (FloBi)

In the course of developing the humanoid robotic head FloBI the Central Lab Facilities developed a variety of soft- and hardware components allowing smooth motion control.
The heart of the system, a custom designed printed circuit board, was designed and populated CLF Reflow Ofen in house. In order to allow smooth velocity and position control a custom firmware, running on the on board Atmel XMega microcontroller, has been developed. This firmware is in charge of controlling up to 3 motors, managing the host communication control bus and monitoring different values (motor temperature, voltages, current,...).
In order to complete the whole package different PC control and communication APIs has been developed as well (C++, Java, Python, Perl).
This system is currently being used in different FloBI generations in order to control all the different motors (face: 15 DOF, head: 3 DOF).
The work on FloBI was/is not limited to the motion control part: several enhancements and new prototypes were developed in a CAD program and a lot of assembly work was realised by the CLF staff as well.

Bielefeld Interaction Technology Exponat (B.I.R.T.E.)

This CLF demonstrator combines different areas of research of CITEC (autonomous robots, augmented reality, virtual agents, and perception) for an exhibition ship of Wissenschaft im Dialog (Science in Dialogue) that was cruising to different German cities in the summer of 2009. It also was part of the NRW science booth at the Hannover Messe 2009. During the build-up of the demonstrator students from the university where participating as part of a practical course dealing with the design of Intelligent Systems.

Dialog Demonstrator

The Dialog Demonstrator is a research demonstrator that comprises all areas of research of CITEC represented by several research groups: Applied Computational Linguistics, Applied Informatics, Cognitive Systems Engineering, Gender and Emotion in Cognitive Interaction, Psycholinguistics, Semantic Computing, Sociable Agents . The Dialog Demonstrator currently realises a typical dialog scenario: an receptionist receives people of CITEC and provides them with information; a guide leads them to offices or meeting rooms if required. The Scenario is realised with the virtual agent Vince and the BIRON robot platform and incorporates a central memory architecture for realisation of a common knowledge. The CITEC Central Lab Facilities are responsible for the integration of the different software components and for provision and maintenance of the required hardware platforms.

Bielefeld Robot Companion (BIRON)

The Bielefeld Robot Companion (BIRON) is based on the BIRON platform developed in the Applied Informatics Group within the Home Tour scenario. The CLF is involeved in many of the research topics of BIRON and provides hardware and software support for this demonstrator. BIRON was also the basis for founding the RoboCup team ToBI in 2009. The first version of BIRON was started in 2001, making it a robot that is continuously developed for a decade now. BIRON is embedded in various research scenarios ranging from human cognitive processes, expectations, and behaviours in human-machine interaction, computer vision for human-machine interaction, human-inspired robot memory, spatial movement concepts in robot-shared environments to social robotics and the RoboCup@HOME scenario.