Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences

About us

Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (BRSU) is a young university, founded 1995, with 144 professors and more than 6.000 students studying in five different departments on three campuses in the Bonn/Cologne area. The Faculty of Computer Science with approx. 1450 students offers 2 undergraduate and 3 graduate programs in Computer Science and related areas. Research in the Department of Computer Science focuses on "Autonomous Systems", "Visual Computing", and "Security Research". The department closely cooperates with the Fraunhofer Institutes IAIS and IPA.

Research in robotics on international level has a strong tradition at BRSU. Successfully participating in European funded projects since FP6, BRSU is currently one of the mayor partners in the BRICS IP.

BRSU, RWTH Aachen and the University of Bonn together with IAIS are founding partners of the Bonn-Aachen International Centre for Information Technology (B-IT). They jointly established and offer an international Master's program on Autonomous Systems, with about 75 students from all over the world currently enrolled in the program. The program has a strong focus on distributed systems design and engineering (including topics such as system architecture, middleware, integration frameworks), learning and reasoning (robot learning, probabilistic reasoning), and multi-robot teams (RoboCup teams).

BRSU's own RoboCup-Team, the b-it-bots, is active in RoboCup since many years, initially in the Middle-Size League, and since 2006 in the RoboCup@Home League, placing constantly among the best three teams both in RoboCup and RoboCup- GermanOpen competitions in the past four years, and winning three titles.  Recently, BRSUs RoboCup team also joint the newly established RoboCup@Work League and placed third in its first competition. BRSUs Senior scientists are active in the Board of Trustees of the RoboCup Federation and EURON, the EUropean RObotics research Network.

What motivates us

Echord Experiments are a new lightweight funding scheme, perfectly suited for short-term trials or focussed technology transfer activities.  By a colleague's word-of-mouth recommendation we kept an eye on ECHORD Call 3 and joined. Participation in ECHORD offers the possibility to transfer exciting research results in (mobile) robotics from laboratory level to Bachelor and Master programs (including the chance to address the general public). It turned out ECHORD had exactly the right scope, in terms of topics, runtime and processes.