FTBI-Award 2012

Dr. Ronny Hartanto stays on the ball: The home-grown mastermind of the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University, who after his excellent master's degree in Autonomous Systems also passed his Ph.D. with flying colours, was now awarded by the Fachbereichstag Informatik (FBTI) at a ceremony held in Erfurt on the 15 October. The prize of the FTBI is awarded annually for the best bachelor's thesis, best diploma- or master thesis, and the best dissertation and is allocated with the sum of 1.000 Euro in each case.

Winning is nothing new for the high-flyer from Indonesia: in 2009 as team-leader of the b-it-bots he became world champion in the RoboCup@Home League. After he took over the RoboCup team of the university in 2008, he rebuilt it: away from soccer robots, to service robots. Under his aegis the team won six cups in three years.

Dr. Hartanto's dissertation "Fusing DL Reasoning with HTN Planning as a Deliberative Layer in Mobile Robotics" impressively combines the planer of a robot (Hierarchical Task Networks, HTN) with its knowledge of the environment, represented in Description Logic (DL). The transfer of the obtained results in typical application areas of service robots, as in the championships of the RoboCup@Home League, was an important part of his work.

Currently Dr. Hartanto works in the team of Prof. Frank Kirchner as a project manager at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen.