Print Media Article in Leoben’s STADT MAGAZIN 2021

Further Links and Description

Article in Stadt Magazin comes with title: Artificial Intelligence. It features Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Elmar Rueckert in the tenth edition of 10/21 print.

Article is available for online reading. Every reader can find it under the following link. Alternatively, reader can access via article picture. Simply click on the picture displayed in this post.

Finally, the section dedicated to Univ.-Prof. Rueckert is captured on the tenth page of Stadt Magazin 10/21.

Print Media Article in Triple M Montanuniversität 2021

VISA D Gainful Employment

Prof. Elmar told me to contact the Austrian embassy in Moscow to ask about the “VISA D Gainful Employment”, what are the required documents, and when can I get the visa.

This visa type should allow me to start working immediately without any delay.

RL Simulator

• Game simulator on Gitlab written in C/C++
  • I should get access to the repository
  • Read the code of the simulator
  • Start applying a basic RL agent on the player
  • with time we should improve the RL algorithms
  • The main idea is to transfer the learned policy in a nonheuristic manner to new environments with different parameters.
  • Start reading about preference learning.
• Future possibilities:
  • Apply our algorithm on other environments.
  • Apply our algorithm on physical systems.

Technician

Short bio: Mr. Bartsch joined the CPS team in Nov. 2021. Before that, he worked as an educator in mechanical engineering, metal machining, and CAD at the education center Leoben (BFI Leoben).

On the 1st of July 2022, Mr. Bartsch completed his education at the technical high school in the fields of electronic data processing, network technology, and telecommunications.

At the chair of CPS, Mr. Bartsch develops robotic systems, electronics, mechanical designs, and complex embedded systems. He is further responsible for our technical infrastructure including our computing clusters and cloud server architectures. 

Mr. Bartsch is the educator of our apprentice Mr. Obermayer. 

Research Interests

• Cloud Computing & Server Architectures
• Development of Robotic Systems 
• 3D Modeling / CAD Designe 
• Metal Machining/Cutting 

Contact

Mr. Konrad Bartsch
Techniker des Lehrstuhls für Cyber-Physical-Systems
Montanuniversität Leoben
Franz-Josef-Straße 18, 
8700 Leoben, Austria 

Phone:  +43 3842 402 – 1904
Email: konrad.bartsch@unileoben.ac.at 
Web:  https://cps.unileoben.ac.at

For Travel Reimbursements

• NOT Confirmed!
• Please download and fill out the form here.
• ….

For HW/SW Purchases

In general, we should try to pay per invoice with the University as recipient.

However, often we need to pay our purchases via Credit-Card, PayPal or Bank-Transfer. In these cases the following reimbursement steps apply:

For Employees

• Fill out the form Q5.5_400.
• Change the term ‘Kreditkartenabrrechnung’ to ‘Banküberweisung’ for a Bank-Transfer.
• Ask the chair or the secretary for the ‘Kostenstelle’.
• Add your bank account details.
• Print the form and sign it.
• Get the signature from the chair.
• Print a document that confirms your payment, e.g., a screenshot of the bank transfer with your name on it.
• Send all documents via the ‘Hauspost’ (internal paper mail) to the department for finances and controlling.

For the Chair

In addition to the steps above, the form Q5.5_400 has to be signed by the Vice president, Mrs. Martha Mühlburger.

• Simply fill out the form and send it via Email to Mrs. Nadine Weber (Nadine.Weber@unileoben.ac.at).

Supervisors: Sven Böttger, Elmar Rückert

Finished: 21.September 2021

Abstract

The applicability of robotic automation has transcended the industrial domain through the emergence of collaborative robotics and is increasingly entering the realm of applications with high levels of physical human-robot interactions. This is concomitant with a paradigm shift towards higher force control sensitivity to accomplish functional and safety requirements concerning the regulation of contact forces between robots and humans. A fundamental challenge in this regard is the observability and estimation of interaction forces. Utilizing the availability of joint position and torque sensors in recent collaborative robot models that yield a larger perceptive field for interaction forces than local force sensors, a proprioceptive approach is taken in this thesis to develop inverse dynamic models to estimate dynamic disturbances and determine external interaction forces during fine-scale motion. A series of state-of-the-art techniques are implemented and evaluated on the KUKA LBR iiwa 14, including dynamic parameter identification, neural-network based single-step, and time-series models, and a novel hybrid architecture combining a rigid body dynamics model with downstream neural networks and joint rotational displacement encodings. The results indicate that significant improvements in torque and force estimation accuracy can be obtained by the proposed method when compared with conventional rigid body dynamics models or neural networks alone.

Thesis

Lernen inverser dynamischer Modelle zur propriozeptiven Kraftschätzung während unregelmäßiger feinskaliger Roboterbewegungen

Supervisor: Linus Nwankwo, M.Sc.;
Univ.-Prof. Dr Elmar Rückert
Start date: ASAP from October 2021

Theoretical difficulty: low
Practical difficulty: mid

Abstract

Nowadays, robots used for survey of indoor and outdoor environments are either teleoperated in fully autonomous mode where the robot makes a decision by itself and have complete control of its actions; semi-autonomous mode where the robot’s decisions and actions are both manually (by a human) and autonomously (by the robot) controlled; and in full manual mode where the robot actions and decisions are manually controlled by humans. In full manual mode, the robot can be operated using a teach pendant, computer keyboard, joystick, mobile device, etc.

Recently, the Robot Operating System (ROS) has provided roboticists easy and efficient tools to visualize and debug robot data; teleoperate or control robots with both hardware and software compatibility on the ROS framework. Unfortunately, the Lego Mindstorms EV3 is not yet strongly supported on the ROS platform since the ROS master is too heavy on the EV3 RAM [2]. This limits our chances of exploring the full possibilities of the bricks.

However, in the context of this project, we aim to get ROS to run on the EV3 Mindstorms to enable us to teleoperate or control it on the ROS platform using a mobile device and leveraging on the framework developed by [1].

Tentative Work Plan

To achieve our aim, the following concrete tasks will be focused on:

• Configure and run ROS on the Lego EV3 Mindstorms
• Set up a network connection between the ROS-Mobile device and the EV3 robot
• Teleoperate the EV3 robot on the ROS-Mobile platform
• Perform Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for indoor applications with the EV3 robot

References

[1] Nils Rottmann et al,  https://github.com/ROS-Mobile/ROS-Mobile-Android, 2020

[2] ROS.org, http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/EV3

Meeting Details

Date : 18th August 2021

Time : 15:00 – 15:20

Location : Web-ex Meeting

Participants: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert, Honghu Xue

Agenda

Vacation and Future Plan

Topic 1: Frontiers Journal

1. Both reviewers endorsed publication of the paper, waiting for the final response of editor
2. Print the Invoice from Frontiers, take to Conni and deduct from TRAIN Project.

Topic 2: Update Information on website

1. Provide some tutorials on using Cuda Pytorch

1. •  
2. Update personal information
   • Add publication with Tuluhan.
   • Integrate it with the transfer learning model. 

Next Steps

1. Data journal submission.
2. Benedikt Hein’s Master thesis as conference submission.
3. Benedikt Hein’s Master Internship as journal submission.

Next Meeting

Getting started with Pytorch using Cuda acceleration

This tutorial gives an instruction on installing Cuda and enabling Cuda acceleration using Pytorch in Win10. Installation in Linux or Mac systems are all possible. An additional .py file will verify whether the current computer configuration uses the Cuda or not. The following instruction assumes that you have already installed Python IDE, e.g., Anaconda, Pycharm, Visual Studio…

Step 1: Check which Cuda version is supported by your current GPUs under this website. From the left figure, we can see that A100 supports Cuda 11.0. It is also reported from other blogs/ forums that A100 can support Cuda 11.1. In this post, we install Cuda 11.1.

Step 2: Download Nvidia Cuda Toolkit 11.1 (the same version as Cuda in Step 1) from the website. In Win10, for instance, we follow up the choice as shown right. The size of exe(local) is around 3.1GB. After downloading, run the .exe and perform installation. It may take some minutes to complete installation.

Step 3: On the homepage of Pytorch, choose the appropriate options as shown in the left figure. IMPORTANT: The cuda version must be the same as in Step 1. It is also recommended to use Stable version. After finishing the , copy the command into Anaconda Powershell Prompt or other command prompt where you install packages for Python. Waiting for the installation, which may require larger than 1GB disk space and takes some minutes for installation. You could also find historical version of Pytorch in that homepage.

Verify your installation with .py file

You could download a cuda-test.py file and run it. If the result shows ‘cuda’, then you can enjoy the Cuda acceleration for training neural networks!

Using Multiple GPUs for further acceleration

Running Pytorch with Multiple GPUs can further increase the efficiency. We have 8 GPU cards and can be used parallely for training. Please refer to (1) (2) (3) for details. 

As PhD you have to attach a meeting note to your personal profile post, e.g., Linus Nwankwo, M.Sc.. The notes have to be uploaded right after the meeting!

Clone this template and change the category to ‘notes_yourname’ (you may need to create this category first). You will need this category to display only your notes on your personal post. 

Make sure that the post you create is only accessible by the administrator and PhDs. In special case you may restrict the access only to you and your supervisor which is the administrator. 

The title of the meeting notes should contain the date and some keywords of the discussed topics. 

To attach the notes to your personal post, look at the example here. An image of the relevant section in your post is shown on top.

Meeting on the 13th of August 2021

Location: Chair of CPS

Date & Time: 13th Aug. 2021, 1pm to 2pm

Participants: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert, Linus Nwankwo, M.Sc.

Agenda

1. Organisatorial progress update by Linus.
2. Feedback to the research talk presentation by Elmar.
3. Topics of promising future research direction.
4. Next steps of Linus.
5. Date of the next meeting.

Top 1: Organisational Update

add you text here.