We were one of the 10 German universities that participated in the robotics exhibition organized by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), namely the DLR SpaceBot Camp 2015. The exhibition took place on 11th-13th November 2015, in Medienparks NRW, Köln-Hürth. The theme of the exhibition was space exploration, for which the robots had to explore a simulated planet surface and interact with special objects.

The following video gives a short introduction on the SpaceBot Camp 2015:

https://youtu.be/uEEUwwG3nRI

Each team participated with a different robot system, which had to weigh less than 100kg. There was a time slot of 60 minutes to complete all of the tasks. The tasks are defined as:

1. Searching and identifying: There are three different objects that need to be found. Each object has a specific color and form.
2. Transport: Two of the three objects need to be picked up and transported to the third object (the so called base object).
3. Assembly: The two transported objects need to be installed on the base object.

We have spent one year developing our solution, which resulted in two rovers, capable of robust and fully autonomous exploration and navigation, including object detection/recognition and manipulation. The two rovers are almost identical robots Leia and Luke, based on the Summit XL platforms and CrustCrawler Pro-Series arms. Our major work was done with the robot Leia, while Luke remained for support and redundancy.

The following video presents our team and robots (in German):

https://youtu.be/SCXbghn9SYI

Attempto Tübingen was a team of 14 Bachelor and Master students and 5 PhD students with background in Computer Science, Automation, Control and Cognitive Science.

• Goran Huskić (goran.huskic at uni-tuebingen.de)
• Sebastian Buck (sebastian.buck at uni-tuebingen.de)
• Richard Hanten (richard.hanten at uni-tuebingen.de)
• Sebastian Scherer (sebastian.scherer at uni-tuebingen.de)
• Adrian Zwiener (adrian.zwiener at uni-tuebingen.de)

• DLR webpage
• University of Tübingen Newsletter article (in German)