Arthur Niedzwiecki

Arthur Niedzwiecki found his passion for computer science in his second year at the University of Bremen. Soon he was hired as software developer for an app, utilizing mobile devices of construction workers to ease maintainance of their workplace. In the meantime he schooled undergraduate students in Object Oriented Programming and common algorithms. Later, still a undergraduate student himself, he worked several years for Encoway, developing front- and backend solutions for complex product configurations, gaining experience in state-of-the-art agile development mechanisms. During a few weeks of vacation the international logistics company Kühne & Nagel hired him for in-depth UI testing of their software.

At the advent of his Bachelor’s degree he jointed the SUTURO Team (sudo-tidy-up-my-room) supported by the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI), where he first got in touch with robots. This student’s project of 15 people aimed to program an autonomous mobile robot to fulfill complex object manipulation tasks in a pick & place manner. During and after this project he assisted the research staff of the IAI by maintaining and developing their cognitive framework. Within this institute he wrote his Bachelor’s thesis on transformational planning of robot’s activities, optimizing a sequence of tasks by utilizing knowledge about a robot’s capabilities over time. Derived from his thesis he published a paper to the IEEE ICRA conference in collaboration with a fellow researcher.

As a post-graduate student his focus lied prominently on robotics and AI technologies. While still working with the IAI he attended the SUTURO project a second time to broaden his scope to several robots: the PR2 from Willow Garage, Pepper from Aldebaran and a home-made Roomba. His part in the project was to establish the communication between the PR2 and Pepper and maintain fail-safe procedures during real-world execution. Simultaneously he started teaching undergraduate students in robot programming with Lisp, incorporating real-world demonstrations of mapping, collision avoidance and path planning on the home-made Roomba.

Even though not necessary for his studies he worked with the SUTURO Team a third time to attend the RoboCup challenge 2019 in Magdeburg for domestic application of autonomous robots, providing a knowledge ontology and general expertise in developing an embedded system for the Toyota HSR robot. This challenge was an ideal opportunity to connect with foreign researchers and gain experience on contemporary applications. To conclude his post-graduate degree he implemented force feedback reasoning for assembly tasks, executed by yet another home-made autonomous mobile robot, equipped with LWR-4+ KUKA lightweight arms. His work combines reactive procedures from the cognitive framework he worked on in the past years, with a physics engine, motion planner and real-world contact forces to increase accuracy for autonomous robots doing intricate tasks in uncertain environments.

With his experience in different fields of robotics, gained since 2016, Arthur Niedzwiecki is comfortable in a broad spectrum of their application, reaching from high-level control over knowledge representation to low-level sensor evaluation. With his ability to quickly get the grasp on novel problems and being knowledgeable about state-of-the-art AI technology he is an asset for a variety of robotic solutions.