28th International
Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region

June 19-21, 2019 at the
Fraunhofer Zentrum Kaiserslautern and the
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern

Downloads

Conference Guide and Book of Abstracts
Conference Guide and Book of Abstracts (reduced file size)

Event Information

The 28th International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region, RAAD 2019, will be held at the Fraunhofer Center and the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, from June 19 to June 21, 2019. The Conference will bring together academic and industry researchers in robotics from the Alpe-Adria-Danube Region affiliated countries and their worldwide partners in a collegial and stimulating environment. According to its tradition, RAAD 2019 will cover all major areas of R&D and innovation in robotics, including new research trends such as: bio-inspired and cognitive robots, visual serving of robot motion, human-robot interaction, cloud robotics and personal robots for ambient assisted living.

Topics

Papers are solicited on topics related to new theories, advanced design of robot mechanics and control architectures, and development of intelligent robotic applications, including but not limited to:

  • Novel design and applications of robotic systems
  • Dexterous grasping, handling and intelligent manipulation
  • Intelligent cooperating and service robots
  • Advanced robot control
  • Human-robot interfaces
  • Robot vision systems and visual servoing techniques
  • Mobile robots, Humanoid and walking robots
  • Field and agricultural robotics
  • Bio-inspired and swarm robotic systems
  • Towards micro and nano-scale robots
  • Aerial, underwater and spatial robots
  • Robot integration in holonic manufacturing
  • Personal robots for ambient assisted living
  • Medical robots and bionic prostheses
  • Intelligent information technologies for cognitive robots
  • Education in robotics
  • History of automation and robotics
  • Cognitive robots and Emotional Intelligence
  • Cloud robotics
  • Ethical, legal and social issues of robotic

Language

The language of the conference will be english due to its international character.

Registration

The registration for the conference is now available over the submission portal under https://www.conftool.org/raad2019/.

Please make sure, to insert the right invoice recipient in the payment form.

Conference Fees

Full registrationStudentsAccompanying persons
Early registration (before 31 March, 2019)350 EUR200 EUR150 EUR
Late registration (after 31 March, 2019)400 EUR220 EUR150 EUR

The conference fees include the participation in the day program, the catering, the conference dinner and the conference documents.
Travel and subsistence costs can not be reimbursed.
The payment is handled by proCampus and is available via bank transfer, credit card or PayPal.
Please make sure, to insert the right invoice recipient in the payment form.

Special Sessions

It is our great pleasure to host a number of Special Session on various research subjects to be held during the RAAD 2019 Conference. Special sessions complement the regular technical program by highlighting new and emerging research topics or innovative applications of established approaches.

A number of Special Sessions has been approved by the commitee and will be activated if a minimum number of 4 papers will be collected and accepted.

All submitted papers will be reviewed similar to the regular paper and only accepted papers will be cited in the proceedings of the conference, published in a Scopus indexed book of the Springer Series Mechanism and Machine Science-Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region, RAAD 2019. The organizers of special sessions will be invited to be the Chair of their respective organized Special Sessions.

The chairs of the accepted Special Sessions are invited to send their full proposal to raad@cs.uni-kl.de by January 11 , 2019

The authors should submit their manuscripts for Special Sessions according to the instructions for authors and the conference’s deadlines.

Further information can be found in the Call for Papers.

Accepted Special Sessions

As the results of an internal review process, the following proposals had been accepted for the Special Session at the RAAD 2019 conference.

Each organizer collects at least 4 to 6 papers for each Special Session. They will be reviewed similar to the regular papers and only the accepted ones will be published in the RAAD 2019 Proceedings. The organizer will be invited to be the Chair of the Special Session.

If the number of accepted papers is more than 6, papers will be allocated in two sessions. In case that the number of accepted papers is less than 4, the papers will be reassigned to the other regular sessions according to the topic. 

 You can submit papers in the following special sessions (listed in order of submission):

CLOUD ROBOTICS

Organzier: Theodor Borangiu (Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania) Contact: theodor.borangiu@cimr.pub.ro

MULTI-ROBOT COORDINATION AND SWARM ROBOTICS

Organizer: Ivana Budinská (Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia) Contact: ivana.budinska@savba.sk

Safety Related Devices and Applications

Organizers: Med Amine LARIBI (Université de Poitiers, Poitiers, France) and Giuseppe Carbone (Università degli studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, Italy) Contact: med.amine.laribi@univ-poitiers.fr

Industrial robots in the machining industry

Organizers: Magnus Volkmann (Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany) Contact: magnus.volkmann@mv.uni-kl.de

Flexible Manufacturing in Industry 4.0 Environments

Organizers: Achim Wagner (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Kaiserslauern, Germany) Contact: achim.wagner@dfki.de

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Organizers: Kosta Jovanovic (ETF, Belgrade, Serbia) and Tadej Petric (JSI Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia) Contact: tadej.petric@ijs.si

Program

Tuesday, June 18th
16.00-18.00 Registration
17.00-17.30 Presentation ITWM
17.45-18.15 Presentation Smart Factory DFKI
18.15-19.30 Come Together @DFKI

Wednesday, June 19th
08.15-18.00 Registration
09.00-09.30 Opening Ceremony
09.30-10.30 Keynote I
10.30-11.00 Coffee Break
11.00-13.00 WeSS01: Safety Related Devices and Applications I WeST01: Medical Robotics WeST02: Mechanical Design and Kinematics I
13.00-14.00 Lunch break
14.00-16.00 WeSS02: Advances in Human-Robot Interaction I WeSt03: Path Planning and Navigation I WeSt04: Industry Robotics I
16.00-16.30 Coffee Break
16.30-17.30 WeSS03: Safety Related Devices and Applications II WeST05: Path Planning and Navigation II WeST06: Industry Robotics II
19:30-21:30 Welcome Cocktail
 
Thursday, June 20th
08.00-14.00 Registration
08.30-10.30 ThSS01: Advances in Human-Robot Interaction II ThST01: Mechanical Design and Kinematics II ThST02: Control I
10.30-11.00 Coffee Break
11.00-12.00 Keynote II
12.00-13.00 Lunch break and ISC meeting
13.00-14.00 ThST03: Communication ThST04: Learning I ThST05: Control II
14.15 Departure to Social Event
20.00 Gala Dinner, Award ceremony
 
Friday, June 21st
08.00-10.00 Registration
09.00-10.00 FrSS01: Flexible Manufacturing in Industry 4.0 Environments I FrST01: Learning II FrST02: Multi Robot Systems
10.00-11.00 Keynote III
11.00-11.15 Coffee Break
11.15-12.45 FrSS02: Flexible Manufacturing in Industry 4.0 Environments II FrST03: Rehabilitation Robotics and Exoskeletons FrST04: Vision
12.45-13.00 Closing Ceremony

The preliminary schedule can be found here.
The detailed schedule as of May, 28, can be found here .

Keynote Speakers

Giovanni Muscato

Prof. Giovanni Muscato

Navigation of mobile robots in rough outdoor environments

Abstract and Biography

Prof. Giovanni Muscato

Navigation of mobile robots in rough outdoor environments

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Abstract

Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) are certainly useful in performing tasks in outdoor environments. Several applications have been proposed for agriculture, humanitarian demining, exploration of volcanoes, search and rescue, just to name a few. However autonomous navigation or even the teleoperation of a mobile robot in rough environments, can be really hard. The talk will present several approaches that have been experimented in the past years by our research group, adopting the cooperation between UGVs and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In particular, we adopted UAVs to perform a survey of the region of interest and on the basis of the images acquired to build a terrain surface model. Then a terrain traversability analysis is performed, taking into account the specific navigation features of the considered ground vehicle. The approach can be also improved by using flocks of UAVs and by a suitable planning of their trajectories, in order to obtain in a faster way detailed maps of the environment. When the terrain becomes extremely hard autonomous navigation of an UGV can be risky and teleoperation by a human operator should be implemented. For these scenarios we developed a suitable interface, combining information coming from different sensors to increase situational awareness and speed-up decision making. Other experimented UAV systems that will be presented, involve autonomous following of the UGV and autonomous landing on the moving UGV. The developed strategies, the algorithms, the hardware and software architectures and several experimental results will be shown for the different approaches. In particular, the application areas have regarded volcanic exploration, landslide monitoring and humanitarian demining.

Biography

Giovanni Muscato received the Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Catania, Catania, Italy, in 1988. After completing graduation, he was with the Centro di Studi sui Sistemi, Turin, Italy. In 1990, he joined the DIEEI University of Catania, where he is currently a Full-Time Professor of robotics and automatic control and since 2018, Director of the Department. His current research interests includes service robotics and the cooperation between ground and flying robots. He was the coordinator of the EC project Robovolc and is the local coordinator of several national and European projects in robotics. He is the author of more than 300 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings and three books in the fields of control and robotics. Prof. Muscato is with the Board of Trustees of the Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR) Association and Senior member of the IEEE. Web site: www.muscato.eu .

Andreas Müller

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Andreas Müller

Geometric Modeling of Robotic Manipulators – A Short Overview for Practitioners

Abstract and Biography

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Andreas Müller

Geometric Modeling of Robotic Manipulators – A Short Overview for Practitioners

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Abstract

Robots are controlled mechanisms. Their analysis, design, and intelligent control hence require adequately accurate and yet efficient mechanical models. Here efficacy concerns the computational complexity of the kinematic and dynamic models but also the modeling procedure itself and the model parameterization. The computational effort of a mathematical formulation is largely due to the used representation of spatial kinematic and dynamical quantities. Noting that the kinematics and dynamics of a rigid body evolves on a Lie group gives rise to coordinate invariant formulations. Moreover, recognizing that screws form the algebra of the Lie group of rigid body motions gave rise to compact and computationally efficient models for the kinematics in terms of the product of exponentials and for the dynamics, such as the composite rigid body forward dynamics algorithm. Yet these formulations are not widely used; rather traditional approaches are used relying on the Denavit-Hartenberg convention and a separate description of translational and rotational motions. This presentation gives a brief introduction to the Lie group modeling of rigid body robots with arbitrary topology. The simplicity of such formulations is discussed and it is shown how this leads to geometric modeling concepts that allow for a simple and intuitive modeling in terms of readily available data without compromising computational efficiency. The kinematics modeling is discussed for serial as well as for parallel robots. For the latter it is shown how loop closure constraints can be formulated in a coordinate invariant manner and how this allows for regularization of redundant constraints. The geometric modeling provides a direct link to geometric mechanics and allows for application of geometric numerical integration methods on Lie groups. This is briefly discussed.

Biography

Andreas Müller obtained diploma degrees in mathematics (1997), electrical engineering (1998), and mechanical engineering (2000), and a PhD in mechanics (2004). He received his habilitation in mechanics (2008) and is currently professor in robotics at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. His current research interests include holistic modeling, model-based and optimal control of mechatronic systems, mechanism theory, redundant robotic systems, parallel kinematic machines, biomechanics, and computational dynamics.

Marius Zöllner

Prof. Dr. J. Marius Zöllner

From Deep Learning to Autonomous Driving

Abstract and Biography

Prof. Dr. J. Marius Zöllner

From Deep Learning to Autonomous Driving

×

Abstract

Deep Learning and Autonomous Driving are emerging research topics that become more and more interweaved. Besides continuously upcoming new achievements in learning, we see successful approaches in the domain of autonomous vehicles reaching from learning individual components of the overall system, over several components at once, up to directly learning vehicle control commands from visual sensor input. However, when bringing these approaches to real world autonomous driving, the question on how to safely incorporate those techniques into production-grade vehicles arises. This issue can be considered manageable when learning techniques are used for highly dedicated perception tasks with a single learning step, but becomes more complex with increasing responsibilities of the learning system. If vehicles are controlled by learning-based approaches directly, rare failures will have immediate impact and thus more severe consequences. This emphasizes the importance for research towards the additional integration of expert knowledge in order to constrain vehicle behaviors in terms of safety and reliability. This presentation will outline the power and computational expressiveness of deep learning approaches in autonomous driving. Furthermore, the potential of current end-to-end learning concepts for vehicle control using supervised and unsupervised methods will be discussed. This will be followed by potential methods to combine such learning algorithms with model driven and probabilistic approaches in order to gain comprehensiveness and accountability. Experiments and results from real world scenarios with our autonomous research car CoCar will be shown.

Biography

Prof. Dr. J. Marius Zöllner studied computer science with special focus on artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Karlsruhe where he also received his Dr.-Ing. degree (Ph.D.) in 2005. From 1999 he worked with FZI Research Center for Information Technology where he became division manager in 2006. Since 2008 he is professor for Applied Technical Cognitive Systems at the KIT, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and director at the FZI. Since 2012 he is also member of the executive board of the FZI. Current research activities are focusing on cognitive cars and service robotics. His main areas of research are in the perception and interpretation of the driving environment, probabilistic situation understanding, behaviour decision and machine learning.

Authors

Important Dates (Deadlines)

  • Full paper submission: January 18, 2019 extended to February 01,2019
  • Notification of acceptance: March 01, 2019
  • Final paper submission: March 28, 2019

Paper subission and proceedings

  • Authors are kindly asked to submit original (not published or being considered for publication elsewhere) full papers with recommended length of 6 or 8 pages in Springer format.
  • All accepted and presented papers will be published in the Springer Series "Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing-AISC", with the title: "Advances in Robot Design and Intelligent Control"- Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region.
  • The authors of the best RAAD2019 papers will be asked to submit the extended versions of their manuscripts for publishing in the journal special issue with JOMAC, www.jomac.it.
  • Best papers will be awarded in three categories: research, applications and student.
  • Paper submission and conference registration are available under https://www.conftool.org/raad2019/
  • The copyright form can be downloaded here as .doc-file or .pdf-file.

Proceedings

The proceedings of the conference are available as printed books as well as e-book from Springer.

Conference photos

The photos of the conference can be found here . To view them, you need to login using the credentials send to the participants by mail.

Exhibition

In the course of the conference, robotic systems and components will be presented in the shared lobby area on both floors. The exhibition includes video and simulation presentations as well as actual robotic systems from different groups.

Additionally, there will be two opportunities, to visit the following facilities:

  • On Tuesday, June 18, those who are already in Kaiserslautern are cordially invited to join a visit in the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, the SmartFactory-KL and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM). The guided tour will start at 5h p.m. in the entrance hall of the Fraunhofer Center (where also the conference will take place). At 5.45h p.m., we will walk to the adjacent DFKI to have a visit in the SmartFactory-KL. Afterward, there will be a small come together.
  • On Friday, June 21, after the official end of the conference, there will be the chance to visit the test area of the RRLab on the ZAK in Kaiserslautern. We will leave at the entrance of the Fraunhofer Center around 2h p.m. and we will be back around 3:30h p.m. Please note, that this tour will only be possible under appropriate weather conditions.

For the preparation of these events, we would highly appreciate a short e-mail, if you plan to join.

Sponsors

Travel and Accommodation

Travel to the conference location

The conference will take place in the Fraunhofer Zentrum Kaiserslautern, Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Information about how to reach the location can be found here.

Information about attractions in Kaiserslautern can be found on the respective wikipedia page and the website of the Tourist Office of Kaiserslautern.

Hotels in Kaiserslautern (selection)

An overview of hotels and guesthouses in Kaiserslautern can be found here.

The following list is a non-exhaustive selection of hotels, ordered by their distance to the conference:

hotel zollamt

Hotel Zollamt
http://www.hotel-zollamt.de
(ca. 1 km to the university)

Single room from 110€ per night (incl. breakfast)

hotel bb

B&B Hotel Kaiserslautern
https://www.hotelbb.de/de/kaiserslautern
(near the train station, ca. 2-3 km to the university)

Single room from 64,50€ per night (incl. breakfast)

hotel art lauterbach

Art Hotel Lauterbach
http://www.art-hotel-kl.de
(city centre, ca. 3-4 km to the university)

single room from 79€ per night (incl. breakfast)

hotel barth

Hotel Barth
http://www.hotelbarth.de
(city centre, ca. 3-4 km to the university)

single room from 76€ per night (incl. breakfast)

hotel saks

SAKS Hotel Kaiserslautern
https://sakshotels.com
(city centre, ca. 3-4 km to the university)

double room for one person from 144€ per night (incl. breakfast)

hotel best western

Best Western Kaiserslautern
https://www.bestwestern.de/hotels/Kaiserslautern/Best-Western-Hotel-Kaiserslautern‎
(close to the stadium, ca. 3-4 km to the university)

single room from 87,90€ per night (incl. breakfast)

hotel blechhammer

Hotel Blechhammer
http://blechhammer-kl.de
(ca. 6-7 km from the university)

single room from 95€ per night (incl. breakfast)

hotel barbarossahof

Hotel Barbarossahof
http://www.barbarossahof.com
(ca. 8-9 km from the university)

single room from 95€ per night (incl. breakfast)

Organizers

General Chair

  • Prof. Dr. K. Berns, TU Kaiserslautern

Co-Chair

  • Jun.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. D. Görges, TU Kaiserslautern

International Scientific Committee (RAAD ISC)

  • Nikos A. Aspragathos, University of Patras, Greece
  • Karsten Berns, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • Theodor Borangiu, Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania
  • Ivana Budinská, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia
  • Marco Ceccarelli, University of Cassino, Italy
  • Karol Dobrovodský, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
  • Carlo Ferraresi, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy (ISC Deputy Chair)
  • Alessandro Gasparetto, University of Udine, Italy
  • Nick Andrei Ivanescu, Polytechnic University of Bucharest,Romania
  • Roman Kamnik, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Gernot Kronreif, ACMIT GmbH, Austria
  • Andreas Mueller, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
  • Tadej Petrič, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Ivan Petrovic, University of Zagreb, Croatia
  • Doina Pîsla, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
  • Aleksandar Rodic, Institute Mihailo Pupin, Belgrade, Serbia
  • Jozsef K. Tar, Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary
  • Said Zeghloul, Poitiers University, France
  • Leon Žlajpah, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia (ISC Chair)

Advisory Board

  • Guido Belforte, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy
  • János F. Bitó, Centre of Robotics and Automation, Hungary
  • Štefan Havlík, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
  • Peter Kopacek, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
  • Alberto Rovetta, Polytechnic of Milan, Italy
  • Imre J. Rudas, Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary

National Organizing Committee

  • Tamin Asfour, KIT, Germany
  • Rüdiger Dillmann, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany
  • Katja Mombaur, Universität Heidelberg, Germany

Local Organizing Committee

  • Steven Liu, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • Naim Bajcinca, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • Peter Liggesmeyer, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • Martin Ruskowski, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • Klaus Dressler, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany
Logo TUK Logo RRLab

Imprint and Contact

TU Kaiserslautern
c/o Lehrstuhl Robotersysteme
Gottlieb-Daimler-Straße 48
D-67663 Kaiserslautern

Tel.: +49 (0) 631 205 3338
Fax: +49 (0) 631 205 2640
E-Mail: raad@cs.uni-kl.de