Jennifer Buehler

Career objective

Research and development in the fields of Robotics, Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence, with interest in projects involving Simulation and Computer Graphics. Strong interest in design and development of complex algorithms.

Languages

German (native)
Spanish (native)
English (fluent)
Swedish (once fluent, needing refreshment)
French (5 years high school instruction, casual practice)
Italian (intermediate listener, advanced reading)

Skills

Programming (various languages)

Artificial Intelligence

Robotics

Computer Graphics

Virtual Reality

Physics Simulation

Unix / Linux

Education

UNSW, Sydney, Australia

2011 - March 2015

PhD Student

Research topic: Capabilities in Heterogeneous Multi Robot Systems

Scholarships:

Australian Postgraduate Award
Engineering Research Excellence Award

UNSW, Sydney, Australia

2007 - 2008

Master of Information Technology

Major: Autonomous Systems (coursework).

Scholarship: Full funding by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Participation in RoboCup Soccer championship (China, 2008), in charge of the Computer Vision.

Graduated with high distinction (avg. 90 credit points).

FH Wedel, Hamburg, Germany

2001 - 2005

Diploma (4yrs): Digital Media and Information Science.

Major: Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, Software Engineering.

Thesis: Realistic animation of characters in a crowd simulation.

Awards:

Graduated as best of class (mark 1.2 ≈ 93 credit points)
Best thesis of the year

2010 - present

Work experience

TomTom GmbH - Autonomous Driving Division, Berlin

Senior Software Engineer

August 2019 - today

At TomTom Location Technology I am part of the team to bring TomTom’s autonomous vehicle "Trillian" on the road. My tasks range across the whole stack and have so far included simulation, generation of testing environments and scenarios, as well as aspects of motion planning and localization.

Roboception GmbH, Munich

Software developer (contractor, remote work)

Project: Contour processing for object part detection

2018 - 2019

Internal project for detection of object parts. This involves processing contours in 2D and further processing the results with depth data from the sensor.

Project: World model

2016 - 2018

Developing a world model for capturing the environment sensed by the robot. Multiple sources are used as input, including RGBD images / point clouds and various forms of object detection. The world model can be queried for collision detection or object information.

Open Robotics

Software developer (contractor, remote work)

Project: Collision test framework for Gazebo

Oct. 2016 – Jan 2018

Developing a test framework to help find issues in physics engines currently used in Gazebo (ODE, Bullet, DART, SimBody). This involved building a framework which can run multiple physics engines in parallel in order to help compare results and behaviour of the different engines. Additionally I supported the OSRF team with integrating DART 6 in Gazebo, and helped to fix some issues I found in Gazebo during development.

The code can be found at https://github.com/osrf/collision-benchmark. Link to merged Gazebo pull requests.

Project: Improving grasp actions in ROS/Gazebo

Jan. 2016 – April 2016

Improving support of grasping actions in ROS and Gazebo. This work is available under an open source license in my github repositories (including wiki pages) on github.com/JenniferBuehler. Main repositories:

C++ API to grasp planning framework GraspIt!, incl. format conversion from URDF, in graspit-pkgs.
Grasp plugin for Gazebo and other helpful Gazebo plugins in repositorty gazebo-pkgs.
Integration of the Jaco Kinova arm for testing the frameworks, in repository jaco-arm-pkgs.
Framework for execution of grasps using MoveIt! and GraspIt!. Repository grasp-execution-pkgs.

Intersect, Sydney

Course developer and tutor

Course developer (contractor, remote work)

April 2015 - December 2015

Development of national training materials for the Australian research community. Topic: Using cloud computing for research. This work is part of the The National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) project.

Topic: Using cloud computing for research.
URL: http://training.nectar.org.au/

Tutor (at various universities around Sydney)

2013 - 2014

Introductory Unix courses and workshops for data management and data visualisation.

Cranbrook School, Sydney

Mentor robotics class years 5-9

2012 - 2014

Teaching Robotics with LEGO Mindstorms, and participating in RoboCup Junior competition.

UNSW, Sydney

Tutor

2011 - 2012
Tutor for 3rd year Computer Graphics students, and providing one-on-one teaching of a student with disabilities.

German Aerospace Centre

Contractor Research & Development (mostly remote work)

Project: Visualization of large datasets

2006 – 2011

Contract assignment to design and develop algorithms and source code for two related projects (2006-2008, 2009-2011), both dealing with real-time visualisation of very large high-resolution 2.5D and 3D datasets

Research of the current state-of-the art, and choice of most suitable techniques to apply
Project planning
Algorithm and Software design
Programming (sole programmer)
Implementation of out-of-core mesh pre-processing, real-time visualisation software, a module for remote control of the visualisation application, and other tools.
All programming was done in C++, using OpenGL and the open source libraries
stxxl, OpenMesh and OpenSceneGraph.

Airbus Hamburg

Diploma Thesis at R&D department

2004 – 2005

Realistic animation of characters in a crowd simulation

Development of a C++ library performing animation mixing for the character movements (using Open-Source library cal3d), incl. Visualisation software (OpenGL).
Module for network communication with the simulation software (TCP/IP).

This diploma thesis was awarded as the best of the year.

Internship at R&D department

2004

Motion capturing of human movements in the Virtual Reality Laboratory.
Ergonomic analysis with RAMSIS human model.
Programming of a network communication module (TCP/IP).

Sun Microsystems Hamburg

Contractor

2002 – 2004

Back-end Programming and Front-end Design for local intranet pages.