Uni für Einsteiger 2019

On November 20, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology organized the event "Uni für Einsteiger" ("University for Beginners"), where soon-to-be university-students had the chance to get an insight into teaching and research at the university. In the course of this event, IAR-IPR offered a lab tour and demonstrations.

The visitors were greeted in our foyer and guided through the labs, where our staff explained their work.

 
The health technology lab was shown first. Paul Scheikl, a researcher from HERA ("Health Robotics and Automation"), demonstrated how robots can support surgeons conducting minimally invasive surgery.

 
Next, Wolfgang Wiedmeyer presented different demo-projects that are part of the KUKA Robot Learning Lab. This lab enables students from all over the world to program real-life robots remotely. This way, they can enhance their practical skills in robot programming without relying on simulation or buying expensive hardware themselves.

 
The lab tour endet in our robot hall, where most of our experiments with industrial robots are conducted, for example bin-picking experiments. Lars Berscheid demonstrated how machine learning can enable a robot to grasp various objects in different positions without being explicitly programmed for it.
 

 
Ilshat Mamaev explained how robots can detect concealed objects with capacitive proximity sensors and demonstrated this capability on a shell game. Additionally, he showed „Slamdog 2.0“, a mobile platform that serves as a subject for student projects.

 
Finally, Patrick Schlosser presented a demonstrator for safe human-robot-interaction, where a number of techniques for safe interaction can be experienced, such as adaptive velocity scaling, human position and pose detection by laser scanner and camera, control schemes for hand guidance and much more.

 
After the lab tour, the visitors had the opportunity to talk to employees about their experiences at work and within their studies at KIT.