Two projects completed during summer internships at our institute received various awards: The students Günther Cwioro and Peter Kohout developed methods for communication between mobile robots and the exchange of maps. They won the largest nationwide school competition Jugend Innovativ in the category Electrical Engineering. The project “Talk Talk” on computer-assisted translation of sign language, which was conducted by the students Madeleine Malle and Sandra Krausler, won the contest of the incubator “build!” in the category students and held top ranks at “Jugend Innovativ” and other competitions. The internships were partly funded by the Austria Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology. Congratulations to all young researchers!

Talk, Talk

During their internships, Madeleine Malle and Sandra Krausler learned how to use the Microsoft Kinect and taught the Kinect to identify simple hand gestures. The idea for their thesis at the HTL Mössingerstraße in Klagenfurt was born! In the course of a year and under the expert guidance of Lukas Esterle and Bernhard Dieber from NES, the students were able to achieve recognition of complex gestures and finally the entire finger alphabet. A computer system analyzes the 3D-information and transforms it into spoken language. “A wonderful example for a short summer internship developing into a complex project work”, Professor Bernhard Rinner says about this successful cooperation between university and school. The project “Talk Talk” was decorated several times:

• 1st place in the build! ideas competition in the category pupils
• Ranked in the top 10 in the AxAward
• Top 5-ranked in the competition “Jugend Innovativ”
• Short-listed in the competition “innovation@school”

Autonomous Multi-Robot System

Günther Cwioro and Peter Kohout also started their work during a summer internship. Their project performed at Lakeside Labs is about networking of robots, and thus the possible exchange of environment information. Under the guidance of Torsten Andre in the group of Professor Bettstetter, the two students of HTL Villach extended a robot system for autonomous mapping of unknown indoor environments used at NES. They implemented wireless communication between robots without having to rely on pre-installed communication hardware, such as wireless routers or cellular networks. The newly created communication skills are used to exchange maps produced by individual robots and to merge these local maps to a common global map.

This project, too, has received multiple awards:

• 1st place in the competition “Jugend Innovativ” in the category Electrical Engineering
• Travel grant at “Jugend Innovativ” to attend the Intel ISEF in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Fti “Talente Video Contest”

“It’s a pleasure to support such ambitious students in their work. The award of Jugend Innovativ crowns an excellent project”, says Torsten Andre. Günther Cwioro plans to pursue a technical degree at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt; Peter Kohout also plans to take up technical studies after completing his military service.