Projects

Based on ideas from Heiko’s PhD thesis, Magimine, LLC develops key technologies helping robots operate in unstructured environments.

Checkout Heiko’s visual art pieces. He is drawing inspiration from cubism and science.

Annie, Richard, and Heiko are vlogging about tasty & healthy food in Taiwan. You can watch the videos on YouTube. In addition, for iPhone and Android, we have an app that links to each video through a map.

This website allows you to quickly collaborate on documents by assigning tasks with only two clicks. For example, highlight a number in the document, right click, and select a collaborator from a list. Then, your collaborator will automatically get assigned the task to check this number and correct it if necessary. Heiko built the website with node.js, php, MySQL, and MongoDB backend and javascript and html frontend.

Heiko developed a new method to learn robotic movements from a single human demonstration, which can then be generalized to new start and end points. This method has been used around the world and in many robots.

The picture of the robot is from the publication Adaptive robotic tool use under variable grasps by Hoffmann et al., Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol. 62, Issue 6, pp. 833-846, 2014.

Annie and Heiko wrote this uplifting and heart-touching novel based on Annie’s childhood experiences growing up on Taiwan’s countryside in the 1970s. This book will make you laugh and cry. It is available at amazon as kindle and print version and on audible as audiobook. Moreover, it has been translated into Mandarin Chinese and German.

In 2008, Annie Wang developed the Rainbow Piano Technique, which uses scores with colored note heads and corresponding colored stickers on the piano keys. Richard, who was the first student of this technique, went on to play the most difficult piano concertos at a young age, culminating in playing Rachmaninoff’s No. 3 at age 15. To allow teachers and students to customize the colors of the Rainbow Piano Technique, Heiko developed the app Smart Colors. Put your favorite colored stickers on the keyboard, take a picture with the app, and it automatically colors the scores accordingly.

Heiko started working on random stimulation for idea generation in 1993. At that time, he developed a computer program for his dad to collect lists of expressions and applications and randomly create combinations from the two lists. At first, this program was writing in Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS and later in Java under Windows. Years later, Heiko created drawfind.com, where you can draw on the web and then randomly combine drawings to stimulate new products or stories. Heiko also published the iOS app Randstim, which uses random word combinations to help idea generation.

At high school, Heiko developed several computer games, including a golf game with 3D graphics (running on an Intel 80286). This game simulated the physics of the ball, bouncing off the ground and taking into account air resistance and ground friction. In addition, he developed a creator tool to design new golf courses.