Simon Schwaiger, MSc

I am a Lecturer/Researcher at University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien and Doctoral Student at Graz University of Technology, working on machine learning and modern control approaches in robotics as well as personal projects.

Towards full Autonomy in Mobile Robot Navigation and Manipulation

Simon Schwaiger^1,2, Lucas Muster^1,3, Alessandro Scherl¹, Paolo Trivisonne¹, Wilfried Wöber¹, and Stefan Thalhammer¹

*Equal Contribution

This work was supported by the city of Vienna (MA23 – Economic Affairs, Labour and Statistics) through the projects AI Anwenden und Verstehen (AIAV, MA23 project 26-04) and Stadt Wien Kompetenzteam für Drohnentechnik in der Fachhochschulausbildung (DrohnFH, MA23 project 35-02).

¹ University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien, Faculty of Industrial Engineering, 1200 Vienna, Austria

² Graz University of Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering, Institute of Software Technology, Inffeldgasse 16b/II, 8010 Graz, Austria

³ University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Department of Biotechnology, Institute for Computational Biology, Muthgasse 18, 1190 Vienna, Austria

schwaige@technikum-wien.at, muster@technikum-wien.at

Paper

Abstract

Robot autonomy is key for automatizing industrial production plants, facilitating responsive search and rescue (SAR), and for interacting in urban settings. This work presents mobile systems capable of carrying out these tasks and summarises experience from practical deployments in three different domains for navigation. For industry, a mobile manipulator is presented, which is used for dynamic precise docking and object handling. For SAR, a semi-autonomous system is presented which is used for sampling hazardous materials, manipulating tools, and for localizing nuclear radiation sources. To improve urban logistics, a mobile robot autonomously navigates complex outdoor environments using semantic mapping techniques. Future work will explore further advancements that strive toward increased flexibility, reasoning and universal applicability of mobile robots. The goal is to reduce training, onboarding, tool changing times, and to reduce manual interfacing times.

Code

We make Code and Datasets available through our other publications.

UGV-CBRN: An Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Disaster Response

Citation

If you use this work in your research, please cite our paper:

@article{SchwaigerMuster2024TowardsFullAutonomy,
  author    = {Schwaiger, Simon and Muster, Lucas and Scherl, Alessandro and Trivisonne, Paolo and W{\"o}ber, Wilfried and Thalhammer, Stefan},
  title     = {Towards full autonomy in mobile robot navigation and manipulation},
  journal   = {e+i Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik},
  volume    = {141},
  number    = {6},
  year      = {2024},
  month     = {Nov},
  publisher = {Springer Nature},
  address   = {Heidelberg, Germany}
}