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 |