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This short clip shows our prototype for the visual perception pipeline we are currently developing for our social robot. The visual perception pipeline features deep neural networks optimized for inference on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier AGX, which comprises the mtcnn face detector for face detection comprised out of 3 convolutional […]

We have conducted interviews with larger and smaller care home operators to evaluate the extent to which our social robot could assist in the current challenges in nursing homes. As with any user research, we have gained some very valuable insights. We all know that the workload for the nursing […]

For our first design prototype, we worked with a wide variety of material manufacturers and service providers. We want to test the possibilities of new materials and manufacturing processes in order to give our social robot not only a beautiful appearance, but also an appealing haptic. In addition, topics such […]

We are happy to announce that we have already filed two patents. Both are important for a strong expressiveness of a social robot. We filed the first patent for a process that allows the robot to make better eye contact with the user. Eyes realized with conventional flat displays do […]

Deutschlandfunk has made a contribution on ethical issues in the development of social robots. Also presented were navel robotics and the research project VIVA. Besides me, Arne Manzeschke, Professor of Anthropology and Ethics, was also interviewed. As part of the research project, we held a workshop on ethical issues. You […]

Robot development is a complex matter. Many different components of hardware and software form a complex system, which gives a meaningful whole only in the interaction. How can one nevertheless test partial components and their interaction at an early stage in agile development? Prototyping, prototyping, prototyping! And with a social […]

The agency Star (strategy, design, engineering and marketing services) has invited us to give a lecture at the MCBW. Wolfgang Klein from Star started with a super lecture on “Our Non-Human Colleagues – Designing for AI and Cobots”. We showed the connection between social robotics and UX design and asked […]

We are very excited that we have reached our first milestone of the research project very successfully. There are basic concepts for all important components and the software architecture. Most hardware components are chosen. The software frameworks are integrated in a first prototype. In a short time you will see […]

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing a map of an environment while simultaneously keeping track of the robots location within it. We tested different 3D-sensors and SLAM algorithms combined with our NVIDIA Jetson board and reviewed the stability and performance. The shown case is based […]

Everything starts small. We bought various camera sensors and screwed them together with the Nvidia Jetson Tx2 Developer Kit to test the performance of various open source tools like Open Face, Open Pose, Yolo and various SLAM kits. Our first running prototype was done.