Humanoid Robots Lab

Requests for bachelor and master theses are welcome at any time. We have built an environment with two levels connected by a spiral staircase for our humanoid robot and have a lot of interesting work to do.

October 2009 - Armin Hornung receives the VDI-Förderpreis 2009 for his thesis on "Learning policies for reliable mobile robot localization"!

September 2009 - Our proposal "Humanoid Robot Navigation in Complex Indoor Environments" has been accepted! Now, we are part of the SFB/TR8 Spatial Cognition.

August 2009 - Our Nao robot is able to climb stairs with a height of 7cm! See these pictures: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

June 2009 - Our Nao robot met the German minster for education and science, Mrs. Annette Schavan, during her visit at the Faculty of Engineering. Here ist a picture of the event.

March 2009 - Our Nao robot from Aldebaran Robotics has just arrived!

March 2009 - We will give an invited presentation about our work on "Learning Efficient Policies for Vision-based Navigation" at the ICRA'09 Workshop Visual Mapping and Navigation in Outdoor Environments.

March 2009 - Attila Görög joins the lab as part-time assistant (Hiwi).

February 2009 - Armin Hornung joins the lab as Ph.D. student.

October 2008 - Christian Plagemann designed our new logo.

October 2008 - The lab has been founded.

The Humanoid Robots Laboratory is a new lab founded in October 2008 at the University of Freiburg, Department of Computer Science.

The lab is headed by :

Prof. Dr. Maren Bennewitz (Assistant Professor / Juniorprofessorin)
Department of Computer Science
Albert-Ludwigs-University
Georges-Koehler-Allee 79
D-79110 Freiburg, Germany

Building 079, Room 1020

Tel. +49 (0) 761 203-8025
Fax +49 (0) 761 203-8007

E-Mail

Humanoid robots have become a popular research tool in recent years and more and more research groups worldwide develop complex machines with a human-like body plan and human-like senses. The motivation of this research area is, first, to develop robots that are better adapted to environments designed for humans and, second, the hope that creating robots which resemble humans leads to a better understanding of the human body and behavior. We believe that studying humanoid robots will give insights how cognitive agents can understand their surroundings by perceiving and acting in the environment as well as how they can perform reasoning and interaction.

Several prerequisites exist to develop autonomous robots which operate in human-populated environments. First, the robot needs to perceive the environment with its sensors and to detect people. Second, it has to build and maintain a model of relevant aspects of the environment. Third, the robot should be able to interact with humans in a natural way, i.e., using modalities humans are used to, such as speech, gestures, and eyes-gazes. In our research, we tackle all three problems.

Furthermore, we are interested in navigation of humanoid robots in realistic, complex indoor environments, which contain different rooms as well as multiple levels connected by steps and staircases.

In all our research activities, we focus on adaptive, learning robots. We believe that key techniques to develop such agents are probabilistic approaches that allow for dealing with uncertainty as well as methods from machine learning.