Mining Public Transport Data

See here for the code. During the summer semester 18, I had the opportunity to take part in the practical course ‘Large-scale Machine Learning’ offered by Prof. Guennemann at TUM. In my team, consisting of four people, we worked on mining public transport data in Munich provided by the company running the buses and trams (MVG). Almost every household in Munich is located within 400 meters of an underground or tram station or a bus stop. The resulting network adds up to more than 587 km of routes for buses and trams only, which are served by 461 vehicles that stop approximately 345,000 times a day and log their position and status every few seconds. ...

March 22, 2019

Who needs a second screen?

A programmers perspective For a long time, I was a strong advocate of a two screen setup whenever I could. Although I still see some benefits in having more real screen space, I have changed my general attitude. The reason for this is that having virtual workspaces gives me a very similar experience. And this wherever I want. As a student, I am only rarely working from the same place. Sometimes I code at the university, sometimes I am sitting at a friends place and another day I am somewhere on the road. If you are comfortable with your virtual workspace setup nothing hinders you from coding with 100% efficiency because the only thing you need is your laptop. In the past, I was pretty frustrated when I could not work at home where I had my second large screen. However at some point, I realized that I could be as efficient using virtual desktops. ...

February 4, 2019

The Handtracking Robot

During the winter semester 17/18 I took a course called “Multi-sensory Based Dynamic Robot Manipulation” at the Institute for Cognitive Systems at the Technical University of Munich where I am currently pursuing my masters degree in robotics. The course was one of the best I’ve had in my university career which is mainly because Mr. Dean, our lecturer, did such a great job. It was sometimes painfully hard to get the homework done because I had to learn so many new things at the same time. Coding in C++, using Ubuntu and ROS, control theory, robot dynamics and kinematics… The course had a final project in the end which I did together with two other people in a team. ...

November 26, 2018

My high school robotics days...

I was lucky that in my high school we had a Robotics Group led by a passionate physics and math teacher. For me it was an awesome experience which defined the last four years of my time in high school. As a team we participated in the RoboCup Junior Soccer competition, starting with simple LEGO NXTs in 2007 and finally becoming German Champions in 2011 with highly sophisticated custom machines. Below are some pictures which show the evolution of our project. We built robots that played 2vs2 soccer on a table sized playing field. ...

April 10, 2018

Getting Started with the BeagleBone Blue, Ubuntu and ROS

Through a university course on robotics I got introduced to the so called Robot Operating System (ROS). And it got me hooked! The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. From drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms, and with powerful developer tools, ROS has what you need for your next robotics project. And it’s all open source. After building football robots during my high school days, this was a great opportunity to gain some more hands-on experience. ...

March 8, 2018