Seminar Humanoid Robots (Freiburg, Summer 2006)

The first part of this seminar addresses some perceptual capabilities a robot must possess that interacts with humans and acts in their environments. Topics are for example gesture recognition, face detection and tracking, facial feature tracking/face recognition, vision-based localization and mapping, and semantic labeling of places.

In the second part, the generation of actions for humanoid robots is covered. Topics are related to bipedal walking, gait optimization, navigation, imitation learning, and playing soccer. 

Requirements and Information

• Organizers: Dr. Sven Behnke (topics 6-10) and Dr. Maren Bennewitz (topics 1-5)
• You have to prepare a talk of approx. 30 minutes and write a summary. Both can be done in English or German. Including discussion your slot will be 45m
  
• The seminar will held as a Blockseminar on Friday, 28.07.2006, starting 11:00 s.t., in building 101, room 01.018.
• The slides for the presentation must be shown to the supervisor before Thursday, 20.07.2006, 6 p.m..
• The summaries should be approx. 10 pages long. Much longer summaries will not be accepted. The summaries must be submitted by August 15th, 2006.
• Topics have been assigned in the first meeting.

Topics

1. Pointing gesture recognition: Tobias Lang [11:00]
   • 3D-Tracking of Head and Hands for Pointing Gesture Recognition in a Human-Robot Interaction Scenario. Kai Nickel, Edgar Seemann, and Rainer Stiefelhagen, in proceedings of FG 2004.
   • Head Pose Estimation Using Stereo Vision For Human-Robot Interaction. Edgar Seemann, Kai Nickel, and Rainer Stiefelhagen, in proceedings of FG 2004.
   • Recognition of 3D-Pointing Gestures for Human-Robot-Interaction. Kai Nickel and Rainer Stiefelhagen, in proceedings of Humanoids 2003.
2. Face detection/tracking: Falko Stenzel [11:45]
   • An Adaptive Colour Based Face Detector System for a Social Mobile Robot. Jon Azpiazu, Tim Smithers, and Inaki Rano, in proceedings of ECMR 2005.
   • Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. Paul Viola and Michael Jones, in proceedings of CVPR 2001.

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   Lunch [12:30]
   

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3. Face recognition: Susanne Kasprzak [13:15]
   • Face Recognition by Elastic Bunch Graph Matching. Laurenz Wiskott, Jean-Marc Fellous, Norbert Krueger, and Christoph von der Malsburg, in Intelligent Biometric Techniques in Fingerprint and Face Recognition, 1999.
   • Face Recognition by Elastic Bunch Graph Matching. Laurenz Wiskott, Jean-Marc Fellous, Norbert Krueger, and Christoph von der Malsburg, in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 1997.
   • Additional information.
4. Vision-based localization and mapping: Felix Endres [14:00]
   • Real-Time Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping with a Single Camera. Andrew J. Davison, in proceedings of ICCV 2003.
   • Real-Time 3D SLAM with Wide-Angle Vision. Andrew J. Davison, Yolanda Gonzalez Cid and Nobuyuki Kita, in proceedings of IAV 2004.
   • Additional information and videos.

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   Break [14:45]
   

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5. Semantic labeling of places: Felix Faber [15:00]
   • Semantic Labeling of Places. Cyrill Stachniss, Oscar Martinez-Mozos, Axel Rottmann, and Wolfram Burgard, in proceedings of ISRR 2005.
   • Semantic Place Classification of Indoor Environments with Mobile Robots using Boosting. Axel Rottmann, Oscar Martinez Mozos, Cyrill Stachniss, and Wolfram Burgard, in proceedings of AAAI 2005.
   • Video.
6. Bipedal walking: Tobias Axenbeck [15:45]
   • Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers. Steve Collins, Andy Ruina, Russ Tedrake, and Martijn Wisse, Science 307, pp. 1082-1085, 2005. Videos.
     
   • A Bipedal Walking Robot with Efficient and Human-Like Gait. Steven Hartley Collins and Andy Ruina, in Proc. of IROS, 2005.
   • Velocity Based Stability Margins for Fast Bipedal Walking. Jerry E. Pratt and Russ Tedrake,
     in Proc. of the First Ruperto Carola Symposium on Fast Motions in Biomechanics and Robotics: Optimization and Feedback Control. Heidelberg, 2005. Material.

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   Break [16:30]
   

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7. Gait optimization: Hartmut Hanke [16:45]
   • Fast Biped Walking with A Sensor-driven Neuronal Controller and Real-time Online Learning. Tao Geng, Bernd Porr, and Florentin Wörgötter, International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 25, No.3, p 243-259, March 2006. Video.
     
   • Learning to Walk in 20 Minutes. Russ Tedrake, Teresa Weirui Zhang, and H. Sebastian Seung.  In Proc. of the Fourteenth Yale Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Systems, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2005.
     
   • Reliable and Precise Gait Modeling for a Quadruped Robot. Uwe Düffert and Jan Hoffmann, in Proc. of The 9th RoboCup International Symposium, Osaka, 2005.
     
8. Humanoid navigation: Stefan Armbruster [17:30]
   • A Modular Architecture for Humanoid Robot Navigation. Jens-Steffen Gutmann, Masaki Fukuchi and Masahiro Fujita, in Proc. of 2005 5th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.
   • Vision-Guided Humanoid Walking - Concepts and Experiments. Robert Cupec, Oliver Lorch, and Günther Schmidt,  in Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region (RAAD 2003), Cassino, Italy, 2003. Slides.
     
   • Gaze Control Strategy for Vision-Guided Humanoid Walking. Javier F. Seara und Günther Schmidt, at – Automatisierungstechnik 53(2), pp. 49-58, 2005. Video.

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   Break [18:15]
   

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9. Imitation learning: Clemens Eppner [18:30]
   
   • Action Understanding and Imitation Learning in a Robot-Human Task. Wolfram Erlhagen, Albert Mukovskiy, Estela Bicho, Giorgio Panin, Csaba Kiss, Alois Knoll, Hein van Schie, and Harold Bekkering, in Proc. of 15th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN), pp. 261-268, 2005.
     
   • Toward Robot Learning of Tool Manipulation from Human Demonstration. Aaron Edsinger and Charles C. Kemp, submitted to the 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2006).
     
   • Incremental Acquisition of Task Knowledge applying Heuristic Relevance Estimation. Michael Pardowitz, Raoul Zöllner and Rüdiger Dillmann, to appear in Proceedings of ICRA 2006.
     
10. Humanoid soccer: Frederic Dijoux [19:15]
    
    • Humanoid Robot HanSaRam: Recent Development and Compensation for the Landing Impact Force by Time Domain Passivity Approach. Yong-Duk Kim, Bum-Joo Lee, Seung-Hwan Choi, In-Won Park, and Jong-Hwan Kim, 2005 FIRA Robot World Congress, Singapore, 2005. Video.
      
    • RoboCup humanoid challenge: That's one small step for a robot, one giant leap for mankind. Hiroaki Kitano and Minoru Asada, in Proc. of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 419--424, 1998.
      
    • RoboCup 2006 Humanoid League team descriptions.