January 31, 2017

Our Mission

Our goal is to develop artificial intelligence-based solutions to support disaster response management. One of the core questions is, how should robotic systems efficiently support humans in situation assessment and the progressive creation of joint situation awareness in dangerous environments. Depending on the concrete mission, environmental factors,  e.g. underground or underwater with polluted or radiated areas, require morphologically different robots to meet the challenges of a dynamic and complex environment, often collaborating with humans or other robots. How such teams should work efficiently and communicate, which information needs to be collected, how it needs to processed and presented to humans, are some of the core questions we are addressing.

  •   Situation awareness and perception (computer vision; sensor information processing)
  •   Centralized and decentralized information management (geo data, time stamps, measurements, changes over time)
  •   Intelligent multimodal interfaces (situation awareness; robot control)
  •   Human-Robot Interaction
  •   Human-Robot Communication, e.g., through speech and gesture
  •   Affective state modelling (stress; cognitive load)
  •   Human-robot teamwork und multi-agent collaboration
  •   Hybrid human-robot teams in disaster response
  •   Autonomous and semi-autonomous robotic systems
  •   Autonomous Robotic Manipulation
  •   Navigation, localization, mapping, planning in little structured dynamic environments
  •   Safety and security (e.g. collision avoidance, secure control and communication)
  •   Robust Environment Acquisition: multimodal and robust signal processing, environment recognition and data interpretation
  •   Software-Defined Safety: safe and reconfigurable electronics to replace specialized hardware (e.g. for radiation)
  •   Teleoperation: operator monitoring and support, multimodal user-interfaces and extended interaction capabilities (VR, Control Center, Feedback)
  •   Robotic scouting and environmental monitoring (temperature, CO2, radiation, ect.)
  •   Identification and Recognition of injured people

 

Topics

Competences and Research Topics:

User-centric approach to disaster response technology-development
Human-robot teaming in disaster-response scenarios
Verbal interaction processing for disaster response management
Situation awareness support tools for disaster response management
Long-term human-robot interaction modeling
Collision avoidance
Autonomous orientation in unknown areas (SLAM)
Secure communication and control
Teleoperation, operator monitoring and support for disaster response
Robotic navigation, localization, mapping and planning in disaster-response scenarios
Autonomous and semi-autonomous robots, complex behaviours
Reconfigurable cooperative teams
Robust object recognition and pose estimation
Autonomous robotic manipulation
Exploration in unknown and unstructured terrain (HW and SW)
Sensor fusion and online signal processing, wearable computing
Human-Robot communication via gestures
Hybrid robots
Electric mobility and road trains (as robotic shuttles)
Security research, crisis prevention & intervention
Intelligent-adaptive action support
(Educational) Datamining, analysis of user interaction
Information Management and Modeling
Sensor-data-based Conformance and Compliance Checking of Processes
Process Mining and Big Data Analytics for Process Prediction