Research Associate

E-Mail	lenz@in.tum.de
Room	0255
Phone	+49.89.289.25761
Fax	+49.89.289.18107
Address	Institut für Informatik VI Technische Universität München Boltzmannstraße 3 85748 Garching bei München Germany
Homepage

Open Student Projects

A lot! Just write me an email!

Curriculum Vitæ

1982: born in Burghausen, Germany.
2005: B.Sc.: Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Technische Universität München
2007: Dipl.-Ing.: Diploma in Electrical Engineering at Technische Universität München
2007: Research Assistant at the Robotics and Embedded Systems Lab, Technische Universität München
2011: Dr. rer. nat.: Informatics, Technische Universität München
2011: Co-founder of Cognition Factory GmbH

Research Interests

Computer Vision
Visual Tracking
Image Processing
Cognitive Robotics

CoTeSys Projects

JAHIR: Joint Action for Humans and Industrial Robots
BAJA - Basic Aspects of Joint Action
ITrackU: Image-based Tracking and Understanding

Affiliations

Member of the Tracking Group
Member of the Task Force: Cognitive Architectures

Videos

Task-based robot controller

Direct physical human-robot interaction has become a central part in the research field of robotics today. To use the advantages of the potential for humans and robots to work together as a team in industrial settings, the most important issues are safety for the human and an easy way to describe tasks for the robot. In the next video, we present an approach of a hierarchical structured control of industrial robots for joint-action scenarios. Multiple atomic tasks including dynamic collision avoidance, operational position, and posture can be combined in an arbitrary order respecting constraints of higher priority tasks. The controller flow is based on the theory of orthogonal projection using nullspaces and constraint least-square optimization.

Internal 3D representation

In this video one can see a visualization of the internal 3D representation used in the robotic controller to measure distances for the collision avoidance task. The 3D representation includes static and dynamic objects and is updated according to sensor data. Every sensor module can broadcast its information about the current status of unique identified objects in the workspace.

Learning a new building plan and Execution of previously learned building plans

In this videos, we show how our industrial robot is instructed via speech input and that the JAHIR robot is following and executing a collaborative plan that was teached-in previously using multiple input modalities.

Kinect enabled robot workspace surveillance

A human co-worker is tracked using a Microsoft Kinect in a human-robot collaborative scenario.

Interactive human-robot collaboration with Microsoft Kinect

In this video a human is interacting with the robotic assistive system JAHIR to jointly perform assembly t asks. The human is tracked using a Microsoft Kinect. Virtual Buttons in the menu guided interaction allow a dynamic and adaptive way of controlling and interacting with the robotic system. The overlay video on the upper right shows a close up of the working desk with the on-table projection for the buttons, the virtual environment representation and the menu.

Fusing multiple Kinects to survey shared Human-Robot-Workspaces

In today's industrial applications, robots are often strictly separated in space or time. Without surveillance of the joint workspace, a robot is unaware of unforeseen changes in its environment and can not react properly. Since robots are heavy and bulky machines, collisions may have severe consequences for the human worker. Thus, the work area must be monitored to recognize unknown obstacles in it. With the knowledge of its surroundings, the robot can be controlled to avoid collisions with any detected object. to enable direct collaboration between humans and industrial robots. Therefore, the environment is perceived by using multiple, distributed range sensors (Microsoft Kinect). The sensory data sets are decentrally pre-processed and broadcasted via the network. These data sets are then processed by additional components that segment and cluster unknown objects and publish the gained information to allow the system to react to unexpected events in the environment.

Publications

[1]	Claus Lenz. Context-aware human-robot collaboration as a basis for future cognitive factories. Dissertation, Technische Universität München, München, December 2011. [ http ]
[2]	Claus Lenz, Alice Sotzek, Thorsten Röder, Helmuth Radrich, Alois Knoll, Markus Huber, and Stefan Glasauer. Human workflow analysis using 3d occupancy grid hand tracking in a human-robot collaboration scenario. In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, San Francisco, USA, September 2011.
[3]	Claus Lenz, Thorsten Röder, Markus Rickert, and Alois Knoll. Distance-weighted Kalman fusion for precise docking problems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Robots and Competitions, Lisbon, Portugal, April 2011. [ .pdf ]
[4]	Claus Lenz, Thorsten Röder, Martin Eggers, Sikandar Amin, Thomas Kisler, Bernd Radig, Giorgio Panin, and Alois Knoll. A distributed many-camera system for multi-person tracking. In Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence, Malaga, Spain, November 2010. [ .pdf ]
[5]	Manuel Giuliani, Claus Lenz, Thomas Müller, Markus Rickert, and Alois Knoll. Design principles for safety in human-robot interaction. International Journal of Social Robotics, 2(3):253-274, September 2010. [ .pdf ]
[6]	Christoph Staub, Claus Lenz, Giorigio Panin, Alois Knoll, and Robert Bauernschmitt. Contour-based surgical instrument tracking supported by kinematic prediction. In proceedings of the IEEE/RAS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, pages 746-752, Tokyo, Japan, September 2010.
[7]	Frank Wallhoff, Jürgen Blume, Alexander Bannat, Wolfgang Rösel, Claus Lenz, and Alois Knoll. A skill-based approach towards hybrid assembly. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 24(3):329 - 339, August 2010. The Cognitive Factory. [ DOI \| http ]
[8]	Alexander Bannat, Thibault Bautze, Michael Beetz, Jürgen Blume, Klaus Diepold, Christoph Ertelt, Florian Geiger, Thomas Gmeiner, Tobias Gyger, Alois Knoll, Christian Lau, Claus Lenz, Martin Ostgathe, Gunther Reinhart, Wolfgang Rösel, Thomas Rühr, Anna Schuboe, Kristina Shea, Ingo Stork genannt Wersborg, Sonja Stork, William Tekouo, Frank Wallhoff, Mathey Wiesbeck, and Michael F. Zäh. Artificial cognition in production systems. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, PP(99):1-27, July 2010. [ http ]
[9]	D. Brščić, M. Eggers, F. Rohrmüller, O. Kourakos, S. Sosnowski, D. Althoff, M. Lawitzky, A. Mörtl, M. Rambow, V. Koropouli, J.R. Medina Hernández, X. Zang, W. Wang, D. Wollherr, K. Kühnlenz, C. Mayer, T. Kruse, A. Kirsch, J. Blume, A. Bannat, T. Rehrl, F. Wallhoff, T. Lorenz, P. Basili, C. Lenz, T. Röder, G. Panin, W. Maier, S. Hirche, M. Buss, M. Beetz, B. Radig, A. Schubö, S. Glasauer, A. Knoll, and E. Steinbach. Multi Joint Action in CoTeSys - setup and challenges. Technical Report CoTeSys-TR-10-01, CoTeSys Cluster of Excelence: Technische Universität München & Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany, June 2010.
[10]	Martin Wojtczyk, Giorgio Panin, Thorsten Röder, Claus Lenz, Suraj Nair, Rüdiger Heidemann, Chetan Goudar, and Alois Knoll. Teaching and implementing autonomous robotic lab walkthroughs in a biotech laboratory through model-based visual tracking. In IS&T / SPIE Electronic Imaging, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XXVII: Algorithms and Techniques: Autonomous Robotic Systems and Applications, San Jose, CA, USA, January 2010.
[11]	Claus Lenz, Markus Rickert, Giorgio Panin, and Alois Knoll. Constraint task-based control in industrial settings. In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 3058-3063, St. Louis, MO, USA, October 2009. [ .pdf ]
[12]	Claus Lenz, Giorgio Panin, Thorsten Röder, Martin Wojtczyk, and Alois Knoll. Hardware-assisted multiple object tracking for human-robot-interaction. In François Michaud, Matthias Scheutz, Pamela Hinds, and Brian Scassellati, editors, HRI '09: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction, pages 283-284, La Jolla, CA, USA, March 2009. ACM. [ DOI \| http ]
[13]	Martin Wojtczyk, Giorgio Panin, Claus Lenz, Thorsten Röder, Suraj Nair, Erwin Roth, Rüdiger Heidemann, Klaus Joeris, Chun Zhang, Mark Burnett, Tom Monica, and Alois Knoll. A vision based human robot interface for robotic walkthroughs in a biotech laboratory. In François Michaud, Matthias Scheutz, Pamela Hinds, and Brian Scassellati, editors, HRI '09: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human Robot Interaction, pages 309-310, La Jolla, CA, USA, March 2009. ACM. [ DOI ]
[14]	Markus Huber, Claus Lenz, Markus Rickert, Alois Knoll, Thomas Brandt, and Stefan Glasauer. Human preferences in industrial human-robot interactions. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cognition for Technical Systems, Munich, Germany, October 2008. [ .pdf ]
[15]	Claus Lenz, Giorgio Panin, and Alois Knoll. A GPU-accelerated particle filter with pixel-level likelihood. In International Workshop on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV), Konstanz, Germany, October 2008. [ .pdf ]
[16]	Giorgio Panin, Erwin Roth, Thorsten Röder, Suraj Nair, Claus Lenz, Martin Wojtczyk, Thomas Friedlhuber, and Alois Knoll. ITrackU: An integrated framework for image-based tracking and understanding. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cognition for Technical Systems, Munich, Germany, October 2008. [ .pdf ]
[17]	Suraj Nair, Giorgio Panin, Martin Wojtczyk, Claus Lenz, Thomas Friedelhuber, and Alois Knoll. A multi-camera person tracking system for robotic applications in virtual reality tv studio. In Proceedings of the 17th IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2008. IEEE, September 2008.
[18]	Claus Lenz, Suraj Nair, Markus Rickert, Alois Knoll, Wolfgang Rösel, Jürgen Gast, and Frank Wallhoff. Joint-action for humans and industrial robots for assembly tasks. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, pages 130-135, Munich, Germany, August 2008. [ http ]
[19]	Thomas Müller, Claus Lenz, Simon Barner, and Alois Knoll. Accelerating integral histograms using an adaptive approach. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Image and Signal Processing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pages 209-217, Cherbourg-Octeville, France, July 2008. Springer. [ .pdf ]
[20]	Giorgio Panin, Claus Lenz, Suraj Nair, Erwin Roth, Martin Wojtczyk, Thomas Friedlhuber, and Alois Knoll. A unifying software architecture for model-based visual tracking. In IS&T/SPIE 20th Annual Symposium of Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, January 2008.
[21]	Marc Al-Hames, Claus Lenz, Stefan Reiter, Joachim Schenk, Frank Wallhoff, and Gerhard Rigoll. Robust multi-modal group action recognition in meetings from disturbed videos with the asynchronous hidden markov model. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, volume 2, pages 213-216. IEEE, October 2007. [ DOI \| .pdf ]
[22]	Gunther Reinhart, Wolfgang Vogel, Wolfgang Rösel, Frank Wallhoff, and Claus Lenz. Jahir - joint action for humans and industrial robots. In Fachforum: Intelligente Sensorik - Robotik und Automation. Bayern Innovativ - Gesellschaft für Innovation und Wissenstransfer mbH, June 2007.

Dr. Claus Lenz