Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Wolfram Summer School

Alumni

Jiri Hofbrucker

Summer School

Class of 2015

Bio

I was born in Czech Republic, I went to study to Scotland where I received a bachelor degree in general physics from the University of Aberdeen. At the moment I am discussing a PhD position at the University of Jena where I’d be working on quantum information. In the past I have worked on several different topics. I worked on simulations of transmission of infectious diseases, I was working on development, testing and simulating of hadron detectors and I also built an autonomous robot. I joined the Wolfram summer school to improve my Mathematica skills and implement them on project concerning my PhD topic.

Project: Interfacing Mathematica with the Robotic Operating System

Today, there are millions of robots operating worldwide, some of which are designed for industrial purposes, enabling fast and efficient production or high level of precision manufacturing. Other robots are built just for entertainment or to assist people with their everyday tasks to make their lives easier. Most of these robots must provide smooth and reliable operation and thus require complex software. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a framework for writing robotic software. It aims to simplify programming of complex robot behaviours using its tools and libraries. The practical design of ROS made the software spread worldwide in experimental branches of robotics such as modular robotics, fields robotics, and the vast area of cyberphysical systems. The aim of my project is to create an interface between ROS and Mathematica. ROS has been already interfaced with C++ and Python. What makes the Mathematica interface different from the two is that it is an easy to grasp language. By default it contains many simple to use functions making it convenient for beginners to start with robotics. Moreover the combination of ROS and Mathematica would open up new control possibilities, making it a powerful tool which would provide Mathematica users with control of lots of different robots on which ROS runs.