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This paper describes the robots TIAGo and Lisa used by
team homer@UniKoblenz of the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany,
for the participation at the RoboCup@Home 2019 in Sydney,
Australia. We ended up first at RoboCup@Home 2019 in the Open Platform
League and won the competition in our league now three times
in a row (four times in total) which makes our team the most successful
in RoboCup@Home. We demonstrated approaches for learning from
demonstration, touch enforcing manipulation and autonomous semantic
exploration in the finals. A special focus is put on novel system components
and the open source contributions of our team. We have released
packages for object recognition, a robot face including speech synthesis,
mapping and navigation, speech recognition interface, gesture recognition
and imitation learning. The packages are available (and new packages
will be released) on http://homer.uni-koblenz.de.
The mitral valve is one of four human heart valves. It is located in the left heart and acts as a unidirectional passageway for blood between the left atrium and the left ventricle. A correctly functioning mitral valve prevents a backflow of blood into the pulmonary circulation (lungs) and thus constitutes a vital part of the cardiac cycle. Pathologies of the mitral valve can manifest in a variety of symptoms with severity ranging from chest pain and fatigue to pulmonary edema (fluid accumulation in the tissue and air space of lungs), which may ultimately cause respiratory failure.
Malfunctioning mitral valves can be restored through complex surgical interventions, which greatly benefit from intensive planning and pre-operative analysis. Visualization techniques provide a possibility to enhance such preparation processes and can also facilitate post-operative evaluation. The work at hand extends current research in this field, building upon patient-specific mitral valve segmentations developed at the German Cancer Research Center, which result in triangulated 3D models of the valve surface. The core of this work will be the construction of a 2D-view of these models through global parameterization, a method that can be used to establish a bijective mapping between a planar parameter domain and a surface embedded in higher dimensions.
A flat representation of the mitral valve provides physicians with a view of the whole surface at once, similar to a map. This allows assessment of the valve's area and shape without the need for different viewing angles. Parts of the valve that are occluded by geometry in 3D become visible in 2D.
An additional contribution of this work will be the exploration of different visualizations of the 3D and 2D mitral valve representations. Features of the valve can be highlighted by associating them with specified colors, which can for instance directly convey pathology indicators.
Quality and effectiveness of the proposed methods were evaluated through a survey conducted at the Heidelberg University Hospital.
The development of a game engine is considered a non-trivial problem. [3] The architecture of such simulation software must be able to manage large amounts of simulation objects in real-time while dealing with “crosscutting concerns” [3,p. 36] between subsystems. The use of object oriented paradigms to model simulation objects in class hierarchies has been reported as incompatible with constantly changing demands during game development [2, p. 9], resulting in anti-patterns and eventual, messy refactoring.[13]
Alternative architectures using data oriented paradigms revolving around object composition and aggregation have been proposed as a result. [13, 9, 1, 11]
This thesis describes the development of such an architecture with the explicit goals to be simple, inherently compatible with data oriented design, and to make reasoning about performance characteristics possible. Concepts are formally defined to help analyze the problem and evaluate results. A functional implementation of the architecture is presented together with use cases common to simulation software.
This work describes a novel software tool for visualizing anatomical segmentations of medical images. It was developed as part of a bachelor's thesis project, with a view to supporting research into automatic anatomical brain image segmentation. The tool builds on a widely-used visualization approach for 3D image volumes, where sections in orthogonal directions are rendered on screen as 2D images. It implements novel display modes that solve common problems with conventional viewer programs. In particular, it features a double-contour display mode to aid the user's spatial orientation in the image, as well as modes for comparing two competing segmentation labels pertaining to one and the same anatomical region. The tool was developed as an extension to an existing open-source software suite for medical image processing. The visualization modes are, however, suitable for implementation in the context of other viewer programs that follow a similar rendering approach.
The modified code can be found here: soundray.org/mm-segmentation-visualization.tar.gz.
Tracking is an integral part of many modern applications, especially in areas like autonomous systems and Augmented Reality. For performing tracking there are a wide array of approaches. One that has become a subject of research just recently is the utilization of Neural Networks. In the scope of this master thesis an application will be developed which uses such a Neural Network for the tracking process. This also requires the creation of training data as well as the creation and training of a Neural Network. Subsequently the usage of Neural Networks for tracking will be analyzed and evaluated. This includes several aspects. The quality of the tracking for different degrees of freedom will be checked as well as the the impact of the Neural Network on the applications performance. Additionally the amount of required training data is investigated, the influence of the network architecture and the importance of providing depth data as part of the networks input. This should provide an insight into how relevant this approach could be for its adoption in future products.
Deformable Snow Rendering
(2019)
Accurate snow simulation is key to capture snow's iconic visuals. Intricate
methods exist that attempt to grasp snow behaviour in a holistic manner. Computational complexity prevents them from reaching real-time performance. This thesis presents three techniques making use of the GPU that focus on the deformation of a snow surface in real-time. The approaches are examined by their ability to scale with an increasing number of deformation actors and their visual portrayal of snow deformation. The findings indicate that the approaches maintain real-time performance well into several hundred individual deformation actors. However, these approaches each have their individual restrictions handicapping the visual results. An experimental approach is to combine the techniques at reduced deformation actor count to benefit from the detailed, merged deformation pattern.
With the appearance of modern virtual reality (VR) headsets on the consumer market, there has been the biggest boom in the history of VR technology. Naturally, this was accompanied by an increasing focus on the problems of current VR hardware. Especially the control in VR has always been a complex topic.
One possible solution is the Leap Motion, a hand tracking device that was initially developed for desktop use, but with the last major software update it can be attached to standard VR headsets. This device allows very precise tracking of the user’s hands and fingers and their replication in the virtual world.
The aim of this work is to design virtual user interfaces that can be operated with the Leap Motion to provide a natural method of interaction between the user and the VR environment. After that, subject tests are performed to evaluate their performance and compare them to traditional VR controllers.