Development of a table-tennis playing robotDuring my master's degree in the University of Tübingen I work in the Cognitive Systems unit leaded by Professor Andreas Zell. The project I have been involved since the beginning of my research assistant position consists in teaching an industrial robotic arm (KUKA Agilus KR6 R900) to play table-tennis. The system also possesses 5 ceiling-mounted high-speed cameras in order to track the position and spin of the table-tennis ball. My tasks have consisted in: - Development of a laser-based security system. The robot is originally supposed to work in an industrial environment, where they are closed in cages. To play table tennis against a human, we cannot do that, and thus we need a system that stops the robot in case a person approaches it.- Development of a driver to control the robot. The industrial environment for which this robot is designed means that it usually has to perform pre-programmed motions. However, for our purposes, the movements of the robot must be highly adaptive, moving to wherever the ball is. This forces us to write our own driver to be able to control the robot from a remote PC.- Development in the configurations to perform table-tennis strokes. The 6 degrees of freedom that the robot possesses, allow us to reach certain positions with different orientations. In order to get the fastest movement possible, we have to explore various axis-configurations when we want to reach a certain position.

GeoNumerics has provided me my first working experience in a technical field. The fact that the company was growing during my stay and the trust I had from the employers gave us a great opportunity to learn a lot. My main activity, amongst many others, was related with INS (Inertial Navigation Systems) and GPS (Global Positioning System) integration, analysis of data, and software development for navigation systems.