Research Focus
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.
