Guided city tour

We are planning a guided city tour, where we will visit Reinoldikirche, Florianturm and some other places in the city. The tour will be on 26th of October, Friday, and we will meet at main entrance of Dortmund Hauptbahnhof at 15:00.

We invite the whole Automation and Robotics students and especially the new students. Kindly participate in the event to make it successful. If there will be considerable participation, we are planning to continue these kind of tours to some museums, industry etc. in the future.

Your A&R Orientation Tutors

Oceans Thirteen for free

The UNI Film Club shows today Oceans Thirteen for free. At Emil Figge Str. 50 in room at HS 1. Start is at 20:15. The movie is in German language.

Source

Group Projects WS 2007/2008

The group projects for the Winter semester 07/08 will start with a short presentation on

Friday 19.10. at 11:00 am in room C1-04-105 Chemistry Building

Afterwards you can directly register for one of the following group projects:

1. Supervised Learning of Vision Based Robot Navigation (Dr. Frank Hoffmann, RST)
2. Implementation of navigation software for the mobile robot "Robotino" (Sören Kerner, IRF)
3. Development of the control software for a lab model of a pipeless plant (Tobias Neymann, AST)

For questions about this please approach the people assigned to each project before the 19.10.

Time schedule for Winter Term 2007/2008

The new timetable is online and can be found here (PDF). The lessons starts normally in the week of the 14.10. Despite Fundamentals of Robotics for the new batch. There will be no training before the first lesson. Object Oriented Programming will start at 16.10.!

For the students of the third term, I just can give the hint to visit the web pages of the lessons or professors to get information about starting date. If you know something please send me a mail, I will publish it then.

The timetable may content false information, like in the past. Please refer to Mr Burda for any complaints or questions.

Courses of the first semester for Automation and Robotics

Below is the list of courses of the 1st semester A&R. These description is just a personal meaning, it is not official by the University of Dortmund or any official representative. Please use this only as a hint and try to build your own opinion.

The most important tip for you is to directly repeat content of lecture after it was given. Do not shift it to the next day. No matter how late it is and how tired you are. After you arrived at home repeat the lectures from the day.

Mathematics:

The mathematics lectures were delivered by Mr. Peter Furlan. He really gives you the required basic knowledge of Mathematics. He is used to give assignments in the class, even though it is not mandatory to complete those assignments, they don’t have any weight in final exam, but it will be very helpful for your final preparation if you submit these assignments as he checks those regularly and mark your mistakes. The other cool thing about Mathematics is that you are allowed to take 16 pages A5 size handwritten booklet in the final exam. Start preparing this booklet right from your first lecture, you can start with a rough one and then at the end you can neat that. But be careful, you will have just 120 minutes in the exam so prepare it in a way that it can help you in the exam, for example, if you write too small and everything is mixed up it’s not going to help you.

Computer Systems:

Mr Schwiegelsohn delivered in the WS 06/07 the Computer Systems lectures. No doubt he is among the best professors of the university. He encourages discussions in lectures, try to participate in that, it really will increase your interest in the subject a lot. From last year he had changed the pattern of the exam, before it was open book but now it is closed book exam. So the format of the exam is also a bit different now. Earlier there were more technical questions and very few things which you have to copy paste from the script. But now you really need to memorize the script. Last year exam, which you can find from the web, can give you a nice idea about the exam. In Computer Systems you are allowed to take 1 A4 size paper with you. You may write as small as you wish, print outs are also allowed.

Fundamentals of Robotics:

Mr. Hoffmeier conducted the Fundamentals of Robotics lectures. You have to memorize the whole script in Fundamentals of Robotics, no other tip. If you are good in Denavet Hartenberg conventions, it can help you because you will get a problem from this topic with very high weight, in our time it weighted approximately 25 percent of the whole marks.

Logic Control:

Logic Control is taught by Mr. Sonntag. This is a subject where you can get good marks, and improve your overall grade. Here you should not infer that you will good results even if you don't study, this only means that if you put equal effort in every subject then this could be the subject which gives you higher output. You also have an advantage here that you have to submit a home assignment , which makes 25% of the final marks. The instructions are not to work in groups, otherwise your marks will be divided between you and your partner. They definitely will know if you worked in groups because the questions always have many possible solutions, so the advice is to do as it is said. In tutorials you will be given knowledge of some software’s, sometimes it’s a bit boring, but try to learn those, it will be helpful for the whole subject understanding.

The Welcome Presentation from the Kick-Off Meeting 8. October

Here is the presentation that Kiran held for the Kick-Off Meeting at monday 8.10. It contains a lot useful information for new students of A&R.

View Presentation

Visit Kick-Off 07-08

Dear future and current A&R students,

The new semester Kick-Off of our department will be on Monday, 8^th of October, at 9:30 a.m., at the Campus Nord, Building ET-A, Friedrich-Wöhler-Weg, Seminarraum 3.21.

Please be kind to attend our Orientation Tutorial. Below you can see the tutorial plan:

Bigger Map

Tutorial Plan

• 09:30 Introduction

• 09:45 Presentation of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Götze

• 10:30 Presentation of Automation&Robotics Council

  • Advices and Hints About Life in Germany and University from Senior Students.
    Brief information on

    • Accommodation

    • Lectures

    • German Courses

    • A&R Council

    • Answers to Your Concerns and Questions

• 11:30 Short break -- Meet your colleagues

• 11:45 Campus Tour

Your A&R Orientation Tutors

PC Pools

As you are already aware, almost for all of your lectures, you will need a personal computer. And not only for scientific issues, but also for all of the information about your lectures, communications with your friends and professors will be processed in internet. Whether you have a PC and your own internet connection, Faculty of Elektro- und Informationstechnik(ET/IT) provides you this service by its PC Pools. Faculty server of ET/IT is called RETINA.

In order to use Retina pools, all you have to do is to fill out a registiration form, which will also be provided by us at the day of kick-off, and submit them. In the map below, you can see the oversight wiev of our campus and the locations of Retina pools.

After your registiration, you will be ablo to use scanners and printers in PC Pools. And each semester Retina enables your account to have 50 pages of print-out for free. If you need more than 50 pages, you can buy print-quote from the Student Union of Faculty (Fachschaft Elektrotechnik, FSET).

Our faculty is also a member of the programme "Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance" (MSDNAA). So all the students, including A&R Students, can have many Microsoft softwares for free during their studies.

A brief list of available softwares

• All Desktop Operating Systems

• SQL Server, Exchange Server, ....

• Windows Server

• MSDN Library CDs

• Knowledge Base technical support library

• Visual Studio, inclusive Academic tools

• ...

Both for additional print-quote and MSDNAA opportunities of Retina, you have to visit FSET.

Opening hours:
Tuesday: 14:00-14:30
Thursday: 16:00-17:00

and for more information. (German)

Campus Life

During your studies, your life will not be full of only your classes, there also will be campus life after them. University of Dortmund offers an active campus social life, special events, performances, sports activities, clubs and student organizations. Our campus is equipped with many sport facilities, which are run by AHS (Allgemeiner Hochschulsport der Universität Dortmund).

Whether you're a serious athlete or just trying to stay in shape, want to learn a new sport or practice your skills, AHS has a wide range of Sports program you can enjoy. Sports program provides all students, staff and faculty the opportunity to participate in fun sports and activities. These include a variety of team and individual sports and special events such as basketball, indoor & outdoor soccer, swimming, volleyball, table tennis and dancing. No experience is needed to participate.

For more information:
AHS
Emil-Figge-Str. 50, room 3.442 (Campus Nord)
44221 Dortmund

Opening hours:
During lecture periods
Monday and Thursday: 12 am - 2 pm
Wednesday: 10 am - 3 pm

During vacation periods
Wednesday: 11 am - 3 pm

Telephone: (0231) 755-3796

Mobile Phone (Handy)

There are four GSM companies operating in Germany, which are T-Mobile (D1), Vodafone(D2), O2 and EPLUS. And there are also many other service providers which buy service from these operators and sell them to customers with their own special offers.

You may already have a cell phone with your home country's GSM operator, but because of roaming prices, it will be a expensive choice to use them in Germany. So we assume that, you all want to have a German “handy”.

When you want to buy a service from one of these providers, first thing you have to decide is the type of your contract. You have two possibilities: you may choose to make a contract for two years, which also include cell phone for free or for very cheap prices, or you may have a prepaid contract.

• Mobile Phone with a Contract (Handy mit Vertrag)

These contracts are usually valid for two years. There are lots of opportunities but they are basically formed of starting price (Anschlusspreis), a monthly price (monatlich Preis)which usually includes free minutes, and after spending your free minutes additional minutes are charged depending on your contract tariff.

• Prepaid Contract

As you are probably familiar with the similar services in your own countries. In this type of contracts you pay nothing more than you speak. But there are also many tariff options for prepaid ones too. You can use your own cell phone with a prepaid contract in Germany

All these companies have special tariffs for students, which allow you have free minutes and a cell phone very cheaply. They often make special offers for a limited time. All you have to do is take all these criterias into consideration and decide the most suitable one for your own needs.