Vanessa Evers is coordinator of the FROG project on behalf of UvA. She is chair of the Human Media Interaction (HMI) group at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Vanessa and Ioannis with a very young FROG – May 2013
Betsy van Dijk
Betsy van Dijk was with the project until she became ill in 2013. Betsy is recovering: the FROG team misses her.
Betsy, Vanessa and Daphne – daily supervisor, promotor and PhD candidate – in Seville, May 2012
Daphne Karreman – Seville, February 2014
Daphne Karreman is working on the development of personality and behavior of a Fun Robotic Outdoor Guide. In her free time she plays the cello and is learning to build violins.
Randy Klaassen – November 2014
Randy Klaassen is finishing his thesis on Health Behaviour Change Support Systems which he will be defending on 27 February 2015.
Randy and Jan joined the project with just five months to come up with a working solution for the FROG state machine, augmented reality and personality.
Preparations in simulation on the red FROG in Twente – November 2014.Testing the projectorThe real thingSlowly! November 2014
The other side of the camera for once
Lynn Packwood – day-to-day project manager for FROG – usually only to be seen as a shadow or in a Tilley hat – and author of this blog.
In the FROG project, partner UVA, that is, the University of Amsterdam, is working on people detection, tracking and body pose recognition. Dariu Gavrila is the team leader.
Dariu Gavrila relaxing after the FROG second year Review
Martijn Liem calibrating his software – Seville, May 2012
Maja Pantic leads the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG) at Imperial College in London.
Jie Shen and Ioannis Marras in the Royal Alcázar in Seville, September 2014
Jie and Ioannis in Seville, June 2014
running experiments in Seville, May 2013
Ioannis Marras
Ioannis Marras is a researcher from the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG) at Imperial College, London. His research interests include image/video processing, computer vision and pattern recognition. During his work, he has developed multiple computer vision techniques for 2D/3D face tracking and 2D/3D face recognition in the wild.
Jie Shen
Jie Shen is a researcher from the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG) at Imperial College, London. His research interests include software engineering, human-robot interaction, and affect-sensitive human-computer interfaces. During his work, he has developed the HCI^2 Framework (http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/resources/hci2-framework/), which is a software integration framework for human-computer interaction systems, currently being used in multiple research projects.
Jie Shen defended his PhD thesis, titled ‘Realising Affect-Sensitive Multimodal Human-Computer Interface: Hardware and Software Infrastructure‘, in May, 2014.
Fernando Caballero Benitez and Luis Merino have been working together since 2003. They work on robot localisation and navigation, respectively. A robot first needs to know where it is (localisation) in order to carry out its mission (navigation). Fernando’s expertise is a bit more towards aerial robots, Luis’ towards ground robots.
PhD students who are fortunate enough to have these two as their supervisors are very lucky. It may be hard work but that goes with some solid training in the science that is the fundament of what they do, and sincere appreciation for what the PhD’s achieve. It’s a pleasure to see this close supervision in action – even if you don’t understand Spanish.
One or both of these supervisors is on hand nearly all of the time
Apart from lots of lecturing and work in projects, Fernando is taking part in one of the European Robotics Challenge in the GRVC–CATEC team taking on Challenge 3. These Challenges are set up in stages, something like the levels in a game. Each stage has to be overcome in order to pass on to the next phase and to acquire more funding. The first stage is to sift out the serious participants. The GRVC – CATEC team hopes to go on to the second phase after October 2014.
Fernando likes a good barbecue and he designed our polos.
A really good barbecueAn excellent barbecue
One day Fernando will get around to making a serious, English language website and you will then find the link here. Till then we’ll have to make do with his publications page.
Luis and Fernando lead and supervise UPO’s team of young researchers………..
Ignacio Pérez Hurtado de Mendoza … without beard
Ignacio Pérez Hurtado de Mendoza is a computer science postdoc interested in the application of machine learning techniques to social robotics. In the FROG project supports the development of software modules related to the navigation of the robot and assists with the deployment of experiments.
Noé Pérez Higueras
Noé Pérez Higueras is in charge of the safe and robust navigation of the FROG robot in (indoor and outdoor) environments with people. Noé is trying to add social capabilities to navigation algorithms so that the robot respects human social conventions and guarantees the comfort of surrounding persons.
His PhD Thesis is on: “Robot autonomous navigation and interaction in pedestrian environments“.
Noé’s PhD is directly related to his work in the FROG project. Mainly, he is studying the different robot navigation algorithms and trying to extend them by adding social skills. To do that he employs machine learning techniques in order to learn from real people how they navigate between each other in crowded scenarios.
Noé and the UPO person detection tool
In 2014 Noé spent 3 weeks in the Netherlands, mapping the Gallery at the University of Twente for the opening ceremony with the Dutch king.
Noé preparing to map the Gallery at the UT in February 2014
Noé fitted in well with the UT PhDs and will continue to work with some of them in the TERESA project. When he makes a website we will link to it here.
Noé and some UT PhDs
Javier Pérez-Lara
In the FROG project,Javier Pérez-Lara is working on improving localisation algorithms, based not only in laser readings but also on appearance matching, to recover from erroneous convergences to wrong localisation or even recovering from complete lost situations.
Javier’s thesis topic is related to robust localisation for mobile robot navigation and mobile robot interaction in crowded environments. Where we try to take into account the variability of crowded environments when localising and relocalising mobile robots.
Rafael and FROG – both in white – Seville February 2014
Rafael Ramón Vigo’s knowledge of transversal competences like electronics, software and hardware are all put to good use in the FROG project. Rafael provides help with the general set up of the robotic platform and assists with the deployment of experiments.
Rafael’s PhD thesis work is on how to infer from data and its statistics the insights of human motion navigation, with the idea of transferring it to the robot’s navigation stack. The basis of this approach is to use machine learning algorithms.
Rafael and FROG, Seville 2014
Rafael also grows delicious mangoes. Recently his family planted nearly 2000 young trees that will come into production in 4 or 5 years time.
Beautiful fruit……from sun drenched fields… in a stunning landscape.
In 2013, Noé, Javier and Rafael had to spend weeks at a time in Lisbon. Though often cold or very tired, they did discover some good places to eat and were given Wi-Fi access at most of them.
Noé, Javier and Rafael nearly took up residence in Lisbon and it wasn’t always this sunny!
How about this for an emblem? It looks great on the FROG polos.
FROG polo, modelled by Paulo
The emblem printed on the polos is actually a reversed version of the docking target. It is a set of ArUco markers that just happen to say FROG – though it probably took Fernando Caballero quite some time to find them. UPO uses this ArUco marker to align the FROG to its charger during the docking procedure.
