News

AMADEE-24 is a Mars simulation conducted in a desert in Armenia. The expedition serves as an authentic trial run for the astronautic exploration of the Red Planet.

This paper presents Uni-Fusion, a universal continuous mapping framework for surfaces, surface properties (color, infrared, etc.) and more (latent features in contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) embedding space, etc.). This is the first universal implicit encoding model that supports encoding of both geometry and different types of properties (RGB, infrared, features, etc.) without requiring any training.

Würzburg computer scientists take a dive -- research study on the use of VR technology in astronaut training concludes. In view of the many possibilities that swimming pools offer for the training of divers or astronauts, a group of researchers led by Prof. Andreas Nüchter has investigated the use of virtual reality (VR) in astronautics.

For ten years now, Würzburg corps students have been awarding the Rector Max Meier Prize for young scientists. This year, it goes to Michael Bleier from the Chair of Computer Science XVII (Robotics).

Project AMADEE-24: The Dress rehearsak 1 took place from 31Aug2023 to 03Sep2023 in the community of Peuerbach, Upper Austria (about 1 hour driving west of Linz). It is the first out of two Dress Rehearsals allowing for team-specific training, procedure rehearsals, integrated sim-sims.

The Chair Computer Science XVII at the University of Würzburg is pleased to confirm its collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) on a research project concerning lunar exploration. The project, titled "Control of Spherical Robots for Lunar Cave Exploration Using Telescopic Linear Actuators for Locomotion," is a significant contribution to the field of space robotics.

Prof. Walter Baur worked with LuRI bachelor students to build and test model aeroplanes in the robotics hall and on our testing area for outdoor robots.

The paper titled "Online Learning of Neural Surface Light Fields alongside Real-time Incremental 3D Reconstruction" proposes a novel Neural Surface Light Fields model that copes with the small range of view directions while producing a good result in unseen directions. Exploiting recent encoding techniques, the training of our model is highly efficient.

M. Gmöhling and S. Köhl present work done as part of their bachelors thesis at the 4th International Planetary Caves Conference 2023 in Lanzarote, Spain

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Jung as University Professor for Computer Engineering at the Chair of Computer Science XVII.

Michael Bleier defended his thesis titled "Underwater Laser Scanning - Refractive Calibration, Selfcalibration and Mapping for 3D Reconstruction" on 29.03.2023 successfully.

On 03.03.2023 Professors Andreas Nüchter, Marco Schmidt, Tobias Ullmann und Martin Wegmann visited the DLR Earth Observation Center for an exchange of ideas and to explore possible collaboration.

On 07.02.2023 students from the JIA group of Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium in Aschaffenburg visited our Robotics department.

On the 2nd of February the project kickoff for WISP - Windkraft Inspektion (Wind Power Plant Inspection) took place at Oktopus in Kiel.

Lionel Ferra, the XR-Lab lead of ESAs European Astronaut Center (EAC) in cologne visited our facilities for a progress meeting on the "Underwater VR for astronaut training” study.

We have qualified for the AMADEE-24 mission! The simulation of human-robot operations could be an essential tool in future Mars missions. The previous AMADEE missions led by the Austrian Space Forum (ÖWF), have

shown that robotic systems in the form of UAVs or UGVs can support astronauts very well

in their field missions.

With a very international group, the fifth batch of 'Satellite Technology' students begin their masters studies in Würzburg.

The President of the Würzburg-Schweinfurt Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Dr. Klaus D. Mapara, presented the 30,000-euro University Sponsorship Award of the Main-Franconian economy to Professor Dr. Andreas Nüchter from the Chair of Robotics at the University of Würzburg. The money will go towards the further development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the Main-Franconian economy.