Dissertation, Universität Bielefeld, Technische Fakultät
Copyright: Logos Verlag Berlin
ISBN: 3-8325-0858-9
Acknowledgments
First, I like to thank my supervisor Ralf Möller. He provided many of the basic ideas, gave support, and was always ready with help. Ralf took lots of care that things worked out smoothly. Furthermore, I appreciate the freedom given by him during this research. Holk Cruse kindly accepted to review this thesis; and Helge Ritter and Jannik Fritsch readily joined my thesis committee.
In the first two years of my PhD work, I shared an office with Wolfram Schenck. This sharing was a very pleasant experience. Wolfram gave valuable contributions to this thesis: I used his implementation of the multi-layer perceptron network and his implementation of the inverse kinematics for the robot arm; to control this arm, he also provided a C++ library; in addition, he took the photos in figure 6.3 and provided comments on chapters 1 and 8.
To set up the robots and to get them running, I received help from Bruno Lara, Janos Kovats, Helmut Radrich, Rainer Giedat, Fiorello Banci, and Karl-Heinz Honsberg. Henryk Milewski provided a computer model of the robot arm. Moreover, he and DaeEun Kim fed me with stimulating lunch-time discussions. During my visits at Bielefeld University, I was kindly assisted by Angelika Deister, particularly in organizing my PhD defense.
I thank my parents for all their help, which in the first place gave me the opportunity to pursue a PhD, my mother-in-law, who traveled the long way from Taiwan to Germany to help us, my wife Su-Chen for her endless support and love, and my son Richard for his patience (for waiting with his birth until the day after my PhD defense). To them, I dedicate this book.
This work was supported by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Munich.