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 following bachelor thesis gives an overview of various approaches and techniques for procedural generation of three-dimensional city models. Especially the usage of generative grammars is being examined and later used for the implementation of an own application. Its focus was the embedding of predetermined primary street networks as well as the procedural generation of secondary street networks and different kinds of buildings. The application allows the efficient creation of extensive and variably structured city models. However, there are restrictions regarding the realism and variation of the results.

This Bachelor thesis describes the conception, implementation and evaluation of a playful augmented reality application for mobile devices. Building on the ARCore SDK, the game pARcours was developed, where the player can place virtual objects in the real environment to build their own parcours. This must be flown through with a likewise virtual aircraft. The main focus in the implementation of the game was on the interaction with the virtual objects and the collision detection of these with real surfaces. Furthermore, various input methods for building the parcours and controlling the aircrafts were examined. In a final evaluation both the game and the various input methods could be evaluated, as well as ARCore with regard to the development of augmented reality applications.

This bachelor thesis deals with the simulation of smoke in a particle system. Here the possibilities are investigated to implement smoke as realistically as possible in a particle system and to calculate it in real time. The physical simulation is based on the work of Müller and Ren, who deal with the physical properties of fluids and gases. The simulation was implemented on the GPU using C++, OpenGL and the compute shaders available in OpenGL. Special attention was paid to the performance of the simulation. Hoetzlein techniques are used to accelerate the particle system. Two acceleration methods were then implemented and compared. The runtime, but also the used memory space of the GPU is discussed.

This thesis is about the design and the implementation of a virtual reality experience. The goal is to answer two questions: Is it possible to create an immersive virtual reality experience which is mainly using impulses and triggers to scare and frighten users? Secondly, is this immersion strong enough to create an illusion in which the user can't separate the real world from the virtual world? To realise this project the design program Unity3D as well as Visual Studios 2017 were used. Furthermore, in order to verify that the experience is indeed immersive for the user, an experiment with a sample size of seven people was created. Afterwards the candidates were interviewed via a questionnaire how they felt during the virtual reality application. As a result the study showed that the application has tendencies to be immersive but the users were still aware of the situation. It can be concluded that the immersion was not strong enough to fool users regarding the separation of virtual and real world.

Global-Illumination is an important part of the rendering of realistic images. However, the computational complexity of an accurate simulation of these effects is too high for the use in real time applications. In this paper Light-Propagation-Volumes, Screen-Space-Reflections and multiple variants of Screen-Space-Ambient-Occlusion are investigated as a solution for real time rendering. It is shown that they are fast enough for the use in real time applications. The various techniques approximate only a few aspects of the light transport, but complement each other.

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.

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.

In dieser Arbeit wird eine Unterrichtsreihe beschrieben, welche aus den drei Bereichen „mathematische Relationen“, „Datenbanken in Sozialen Netzwerken“ und „Datenschutz“ zusammengesetzt ist. Zu jedem Bereich wird ein eigener Unterrichtsentwurf präsentiert. Außerdem wurde im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit ein Programm zur Visualisierung der Relationen des Sozialen Netzwerks Instahub entworfen, welches im Anschluss an die Beschreibung der Unterrichtsreihe aufgeführt wird.

Stylized image triangulation is a popular tool of image processing. Results can be found on magazine covers or bought as a piece of art. Common use cases are filters by mobile apps or programs dedicated to automated triangulation. This thesis is based upon a paper that achieves new results formulating the adaptive dynamic triangulation as optimization problem. With this approach, new results concerning visual and technical quality are accomplished. One aim of this thesis is to make this approach accessible to as many users as possible. To reach users, a mobile app called Mesh is designed and implemented. A client-host-system is presented which relieves the app from computing the result requiring a lot of resources. Therefore, transferring the approach to a CPU based solution is part of the thesis. Also, a webserver is implemented that handles the communication between app and algorithm. “Mesh” enables the user to send a arbitrary image to the server whose result can be downloaded. Part of the research deals with optimizing the method. As the main step, the gradient descent method, which minimizes an approximation error, is examined with three different approaches re-defining the movement of a point: The limitation of the directions of movement in a meaningful manner, diagonal directions and a dynamically repositioning of points are analyzed. Results show no improvement of visual quality using diagonal instead of horizontal and vertical steps. Disallowing a point to take its last position, the limitation of step opportunities results in a loss of visual quality but reaches an intended global error earlier. The dynamically repositioning rests upon a vectorbased solution that weights the directions and applies a factor to each of them. This results in a longer computational time but also in a higher visual quality. Inspired by the work of Josh Bryan, another part of research aims at imitating an artists style. With the use of pseudo-random events combined with a geometryshader, a more natural look shall be achieved. This method illustrates a way of adding minor details to a rendering. To imitate an artist's work, a more complex and more precise triangulation is needed. As the last aspect, a renderstyle is presented. The style uses a center for its effect moving the triangles of a triangulation apart. The arbitrary choice of placing the centrum enables the renderstyle to be used in animations.