Research Group Robotics and Process Control, University of Kaiserslautern
Headed by Professor Dr. Von Puttkamer, the Robotics and Process Research Group at the University of Kaiserslautern focused on the application of computers in the control of technical processes. Aside from its main topic, the German university based research group was also into some special fields of interests, like the development and creation of autonomous mobile robots, learning systems, 3D measurements and the simulation of automated processes.
Unfortunately, the robotics and process control research group at the German university ceased to exist in October of 2001, and has no longer offered nor developed any projects inside its research facilities or laboratory.
Some of the notable projects that the research group worked on before the group closed shop are as follows:
CAROL: short for Camera Based Adaptive Robot Navigation and Learning, this project aimed to develop the adaptive methods for camera and multisensory-based mobile robot navigation.
MOBOCOB: the Mobile Robot Control by Concurrent Behaviors is a generic framework for the investigation of behavior based architectures and was created with a special interest to learning methods. The main objective of this project lay on Learning from Demonstration (LFD) of reactive behaviors, and at the same time the temporal systems in the 3-D field.
The research group also did some research programs in anticipation of the Autonomous Walking program, which was sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), a German research community. Here the Robotics and Process Control group tried to sense ground profiles for the safe leg placement of walking robots through the use of 3D sonar ranging. The basic goals for this research, which was the Sonar-based ground profile analysis, included the development of an array of simultaneous operating and individually-coded sonar sensors and suitable signal processing algorithms.
Another research activity that the group accomplished was 3D Scanning. Under this activity, the group developed the SMARAGD project; the Smart Acquisition of Geometric Range Data. Here the group aimed at the development of new scanning methods for easy and flexible 3D data acquisition of arbitrary objects.
