Biography

His career at the FZI first started in February 2014 as a working student in the department Interactive Diagnostic and Service Systems (IDS). In March 2017 after completing his studies he started as a research scientist in the same department. He deals with the Robot Operating System (ROS) and has been responsible for several demonstrators recently like the CocktailBot, the ConveyorBot or the CookieBot.

In addition to industrial project work for various customers of almost all fields, he is doing his Ph.D. in the field of service robotics and additive manufacturing. Modern concepts of robotics are combined in 3d printing to reduce manual work steps as far as possible. At the same time, sensor systems are used in and at the printer during the printing process to detect flaws and errors at an early stage. This leads to automatic quality assurance and allows to in-situ adjust parameters or notify the user about the occurred error. To goal of his Ph.D. is to improve the process of 3d printing by adding service robotics to reduce the error rate, material waste, and health hazards for employees, as they have to spend significantly less time near the printers.

The bachelor’s degree focused on telematics and computer architectures and was completed with a thesis on optical data transmission between an embedded device and a smartphone. In the master’s program, he dived into robotics and automation as well as cognitive systems. While studying, Pascal took part in an exchange Erasmus semester at Aalto University, Finland, and delved into the topics around Artificial Intelligence. Back in Karlsruhe and the FZI, the master thesis dealt with the control of robots by Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) in combination with reinforcement learning and dopamine injection.