The Architecture of Perception

Nico Hochgeschwender (left) with other fellowship holders at the PhD Poster Exhibition

As part of the PhD Poster Exhibition on 28 November 2012, academic staff member Nico Hochgeschwender was awarded a doctoral fellowship by the Graduate Institute of the university. Subject of his work is the development of a perceptual architecture for autonomous systems.

In his thesis, "Model-based Development of Perception Software in Robotics" (PhD poster, pdf), Hochgeschwender develops a concept of a Robot Perception Architecture (RPA) independent of changes in task specifications.

Conventional RPAs are usually not modifiable in retrospect and only work for predefined areas of application. It is the aim of the Ph.D. to create the basic structure of a RPA that scales with the ever-growing task-relevant information required for future task-driven general-purpose service robots.

Nico Hochgeschwender with robot Jenny in the background

As a platform for his research Hochgeschwender uses the service robots youBot and Jenny of the b-it-bots team of the university, being a team member himself. The doctoral thesis is supervised by Prof. Kraetzschmar of Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University and Prof. Dr. Holger Voos of the University of Luxembourg.

The new father of a young daughter, mountaineer and rugby player who has worked as a systems and software engineer is employed as a research associate in the department of computer science (MAS) and the EU Projekt BRICS since 2009.