The team of FRANCOR e.V. supports the Nuremberg school teams at the game find-life-on-mars.

Today on 11.12 was the kick-off for the school-wide game “Find Life on Mars”. There are two teams the Robotics and the Martians. The Robotics have to land on Mars and overcome the obstacles designed by the Martians team. A total of four schools are working on this project and are supported by Nuremberg organizations and partners from industry.

After the kick-off, the student teams get together and start the project. The two teams will then compete against each other in July 2022.

We look forward to supporting the teams with our robotics know-how as experts.

The year 2020 was, as for many, a busy year for FRANCOR. Many activities were cancelled or could not be started because of the Corona Pandemic. The joint meetings were only possible online and significantly limited the purpose of the association. Nevertheless, we were able to implement a few things, a list can be found in this annual review.

Hackaton@Evocortex

On February 15, 2020 we met at the company Evocortex GmbH in Nuremberg, which thankfully made their rooms available to us for a hackathon. The goal of the hackathon was to further improve our robot for the Rescue competition. A nice side effect was that we could welcome a new member in our club at this date. Christian, Helmut, Martin and Michael participated in the hackathon.

The gallery shows a few impressions of the hackathon. At the end of the event, our robot Morty had a robotic arm for inspection and manipulation tasks.

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RoboCup German Open 2020

RoboCup 2020 in Magdeburg unfortunately had to be cancelled due to the Corona pandemic. An alternative event at the German Rescue Robotics Center (DRZ e.V.) in Dortmund in early November also had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. Furthermore, the RoboCup 2021 in Magdeburg has already been cancelled, as it is still not sure if the pandemic is over at that time. We hope to be active in rescue robotics again soon, but expect high restrictions also in 2021.

RoboCup Rescue Arena @TH-Nürnberg

In order to be able to train better for Robocup Rescue, Team AutonOHM decided to build an arena training. Team AutonOHM has kindly allowed us to train there as well. Thank you for that.

Of course, we as Team Francor helped with the set-up.

Annual general meeting 28.12.2020

On 28.12.2020 all members of the association met online via the Discord program. In addition to the normal organizational issues, a new board was elected, as stipulated in the statutes. The following people were unanimously elected as the board:

• 1. Vorstand: Christian Wendt
• 2. Vorstand: Michael Schmidpeter
• Kassenwart: Michael Weidinger

Further development Libfrancor C++

In the context of our robot development, a C++ library is being developed that will provide the necessary features for navigation, perception, interpretation and manipulation of the environment. The special feature compared to existing open source libraries is the focus on process control and diagnosis and less on the algorithms themselves. We see the knowledge about the state of the system (robot) as very important and want to meet this with this library.

The library is currently still under development and not released. However, we have made good progress this year. Among other things, the following features have been developed:

• Logging
• Parameter Handling
• Occupancy Grid Registration and Reconstruction Methods
• Kalman Filter for Ego Object Filtering with Transition and Sensor Model Design
• Basic grid and array classes with extended iterator access classes and shared memory approach for shared content

The current version can be found on GitHub and is available for free: https://github.com/franc0r/libfrancor