main page

Acknowledgments

It was a pleasure for me to work with all the wonderful people in our lab here in Freiburg. First of all, I would like to thank Wolfram Burgard for being a great advisor. His ideas and tremendous support had a major influence on this thesis. He spend a lot of time helping me as well as all the other people in our lab. I would like to thank him for his "How to Write a Paper" tutorials late at night before deadlines and for giving me the chance to visit several interesting conferences. I learned a lot during this time and I am convinced that this knowledge will help me in the future.

I would like to thank Dieter Fox for reviewing my thesis. I am happy to have such a supportive co-supervisor. I enjoyed his interest in my research as well as the fruitful discussions.

My thanks to my friends and colleagues for the great time I had in our group. I enjoyed the atmosphere, their friendship, and their support. My thanks to Henrik Andreasson, Maren Bennewitz, Greg Cielniak, Giorgio Grisetti, Dirk Hähnel, Oscar Martinez Mozos, Luis Montesano, Patrick Pfaff, Christian Plagemann, Axel Rottmann, Daniel Sack, Rudolph Triebel, and Michael Veeck for the great collaboration over the years. It was a pleasure to work with all these people and to benefit from their knowledge. Especially, I would like to thank Giorgio Grisetti for the interesting and fruitful discussions, for the great collaboration on mapping, and for the cool time we had in Freiburg and Rome. Furthermore, special thanks to Dirk Hähnel for his help on different problems and for providing me several useful pieces of his code.

My thanks to Oscar Martinez Mozos, Axel Rottmann, and Daniel Meier for their collaboration while writing their diploma theses in our group.

My thanks to Erica Hanning for proof-reading several papers and for providing helpful suggestions for improving this manuscript. Any ``linguistic crimes'' are mine alone. My thanks also to Dave Ferguson for proof-readings parts of this document.

My thanks to Barbara Frank, Mathias Maier, Moritz Tacke, Kai Wurm, and Dirk Zitterell for accompanying and supporting our group over many years.

My thanks to Kristian Kersting for being open-minded to questions.

Special thanks to Nick Roy and Mike Montemerlo who did a great job in developing and maintaining the Carnegie Mellon Robot Navigation Toolkit (CARMEN). It was a pleasure for me to work together with them on CARMEN. Furthermore, I would like to thank Kristine and Nick Roy for their great hospitality during my visits in Boston.

My thanks to Javier Minguez and Patrick Jensfelt for providing me their code on nearness diagram navigation.

My thanks to Robert Sim for his helpful comments on recovering particle diversity.

My thanks to Joelle Pineau for her comments on grid resolution and grid uncertainty.

My thanks to Mark Moors and Frank Schneider for the collaboration on multi-robot exploration.

My thanks to Susanne Bourjaillat for help on administrative matters and Michael Keser for help on technical problems.

Additionally, I would like to thank several people, who published robot datasets and in this way helped to make mapping approaches more robust and more easily comparable. In this context, I would like to thank Nick Roy and Andrew Howard who set up the Robot Data Repository (Radish) and provided several log files. Furthermore, my thanks to Patrick Beeson for the University of Texas (ACES) dataset, to Dirk Hähnel for recording log files at the Intel Research Lab, the University of Washington, the Belgioioso castle, the Bruceton mine, and several other places. My thanks to Mike Bosse as well as John Leonard for the MIT Killian Court dataset, to Steffen Gutmann for the map of building 52 at the University of Freiburg, and to Udo Frese for the DLR map.

Last but not least, I wish to thank my family who have always supported me, Jan and Lena as well as Holger and Christoph for real friendship, and most of all Maren for enjoying life together with me.



This thesis has partly been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under contract number SFB/TR-8 (A3) and by the IST Program of the Commission of the European Community (EC) under contract number IST-2000-29456 (WebFAIR). Their support is gratefully acknowledged.