The ROVINA Consortium successfully finishes the 3rd year review of the project demonstrating autonomous exploration, semantic annotations and robust homing in the Priscilla catacomb in Rome. See examples videos on our media page.

The Section on Geoinformatics (Sektion Geoinformatik) of the German Geodetic Commission (Deutsche Geodätische Kommission, DGK) and the Working Group on Geoinformatics (Arbeitskreis Geoinformatik) of the German Society for Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung und Geoinformation, DGPF) will hold their second joint PhD colloquium on February 23, 2016 at the University of Bonn. The colloquium aims to stimulate scientific exchange between young researchers in the interdisciplinary field of geoinformatics. It is targeted at PhD students who have already made considerable advances in their PhD projects and are able and highly motivated to share their findings.
PhD students from all disciplines dealing with methods for the processing of geospatial information (e.g., geoinformatics, photogrammetry, computer science, cartography, geography, remote sensing) are welcome. We particularly invite PhD students working on problems related to the focus topic “Methodology of Mobile and Dynamic Systems”.

This includes but is not limited to the following problems:

• Motion prediction, detection of movement patterns, and trajectory analysis
• Mapping in dynamic environments
• Simultaneous localization and mapping
• Integration and analysis of data from mobile sensors
• Algorithms for dynamic and interactive maps
• Representation and analysis of multi-temporal data, e.g., video or remote sensing data
• Estimation of semantic information from sensor data

On Feb, 22 the Section for Geoinformation, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of the German Geodetic Commission (DGK) meets in Bonn.

We are happy that from Feb 11 on, Jens Behley joins our Photogrammetry Lab as a new postdoc.

Alberto Pretto is giving a tutorial on Google’s TensorFlow library on Feb 11, 2016 in the 2nd floor of Nussallee 15. Feel free to join!

Six out of six ICRA 2016 submissions have been accepted (3 as IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and 3 as regular ICRA submissions).

• I. Bogoslavskyi, M. Mazuran, and C. Stachniss, “Robust Homing for Autonomous Robots,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) , 2016.
• P. Lottes, M. Hoeferlin, S. Sander, M. Müter, P. Schulze-Lammers, and C. Stachniss, “An Effective Classification System for Separating Sugar Beets and Weeds for Precision Farming Applications,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) , 2016.
• J. Schneider, C. Eling, L. Klingbeil, H. Kuhlmann, W. Förstner, and C. Stachniss, “Fast and Effective Online Pose Estimation and Mapping for UAVs,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) , 2016.
• O. Vysotska and C. Stachniss, “Lazy Data Association For Image Sequences Matching Under Substantial Appearance Changes,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 1, iss. 1, pp. 1-8, 2016.
• S. Osswald, M. Bennewitz, W. Burgard, and C. Stachniss, “Speeding-Up Robot Exploration by Exploiting Background Information,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2016.
• J. Schneider, C. Stachniss, and W. Förstner, “On the Accuracy of Dense Fisheye Stereo,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 1, iss. 1, pp. 227-234, 2016.

The second review meeting of the EUROPA2 meeting was successful and the project received an ‘excellent’.