Background Information
Future field „Intelligent Robots“
The technology for the realisation of intelligent robots will soon play a key role for developed countries. The effects on our way of living and our economy will be important, similar to the development of the automobile in the past, possibly even more far-ranging.
It is widely agreed on that the utilization of the available potential requires artificial cognitive abilities for robots and other technical artefacts, like e.g. household appliances. Such cognitive capabilities will help to implement functions, which are tailored to humans and therefore, require advanced perception and cognition skills on part of the machine. Examples are assistant robots in the household or robots for the support of the home care for the elderly, „intelligent“ house infrastructure, or household appliances, which „know their users“ and adapt to the individual pattern of usage.
Different from traditional fields of technology, humans -- and other animals to some degree -- are the only exemplars providing benchmarks for cognitive abilities. Thus the challenge we face goes far beyond engineering and computer science. Substantial success requires the cross-disciplinary integration of experience in engineering and informatics, brain science, and cognition including the humanities and social science.
The „Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab)“, supported by the ministry of Innovation, Science, Research and Technology, North Rhine-Westphalia
In view of these exciting perspectives and challenges, the Bielefeld University has founded the „Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab)“ as a central scientific institute in July 2007, generously funded by the Ministry of Innovation, Science, Research and Technology, North Rhine-Westphalia. The aim is to establish a centre in an important field of high-technology in the region Ostwestfalen-Lippe, where fundamentally orientated research in university and industry can establish synergies to foster the development of cutting-edge innovative technology.
The strategical vision is to fortify the research infrastructure and the potential of innovation of this region, both to support the domestic medium-size economy and to strengthen the position of the Bielefeld University in the competition for further expansion of the main focus area in „intelligent systems“. In particular, the Bielefeld research groups in Neuroinformatics (Prof. H. Ritter, PD. Dr. J. Steil) and Applied Computer science (Prof. G. Sagerer) are widely known for their work in intelligent systems, artifical cognition, computer vision, neural networks and robot learning architectures. They have applied new cognition inspired algorithms to various robots reaching from very dexterous hand-arm systems to upper-body torsos with a particular emphasis on human-machine interaction and communication.
The CoR-Lab will provide a scientific and organisational unit acting as a strong partner for national and international scientific and industrial cooperation.
Strategic partnership with the Honda Research Institute GmbH
The formation of the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics is closely connected to the development of a strategic partnership with the industrial partner Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH (HRI-EU) headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. E. Körner. Honda R&D Inc., Japan has developed a unique technological platform -- the humanoid robot ASIMO, which is one of the world’s leading full body walking robots. Based on this platform and intensive research in human-like artificial cognition, HRI-EU has recently improved the cognitive capabilities of ASIMO. ASIMO now commands many perceptive and communicative skills, which enable the robot to interact with humans in more natural ways.
The Bielefeld groups and the Honda Research Institute Europe are ideal partners to realize synergies between industrial and university research in the important research field of „intelligent robots“. While both have been collaborating for many years in research and PhD. projects, they now want to bring their partnerhsip up to a new quality by jointly facing the still enormous challenges in creating tomorrows cognitive robots.
ASIMO Goes University
A spectacular detail of the cooperation is that Honda for the first time provides two humanoid robots ASIMO as research platforms to a university. While ASIMO so far has mainly represented the technological competence and progressiveness of Honda, this new quality of research cooperation emphasises Honda’s continuous commitment to contribute to the advancement of science for the benefit of our society. It is planned to use ASIMO both in interaction studies with adults and children, e.g. for the evaluation of the acceptance of humanoid robots in our society, and in technologically orientated projects for the advancement of the cognitive and motion skills.
Graduate School in Cognition and Robotics in Cooperation of CoR-Lab and Honda Research Institute Europe
The core of the Honda-Bielefeld cooperation will be a jointly maintained graduate school. While the basic facilities, management, and laboratory space will be contributed by the CoR-Lab, HRI-EU will support 15-20 PhD. students and postdocs in joint research projects. Consequently, the students will have the chance to work on fundamental problems in cognitive robotics while being closely associated with an industrial research institute. The ASIMO robots provided by Honda will of course also be accessible within the graduate school. Therefore, the graduate school will be able to offer a broad spectrum of possible topics for dissertations and postgraduate studies, which will be executed under joint supervision of university and external partners like the Honda Research Institute Europe.
Research program Frontiers in Cognition and Robotics
The complementary expertise of the university and the industrial partner enables the CoR-Lab to approach major challenges in the field from unique perspectives: How can we enable robots to cope better with uncertainties, e.g. to correctly interpret vague instructions? How can robots communicate easier and work together with humans? How can we teach robots more easily or even enable them to learn autonomously? How can we endow them with a basic configuration of social competence?
Making progress in such fundamental questions typically demands interdisciplinarity crossing borders between engineering and social sciences. The integration of language processing and dialogue systems with neural control and learning procedures will give new impulses for interaction with robots.
In the CoR-Lab, it is also planned to integrate a household interaction scenario into the ASIMO robotic laboratory. Using video tracking, audio recording and monitoring of robot actions an extensive collection of human-robot interaction data will be generated. This will allow researchers to analyse sociological and psychological aspects of the human-humanoid interaction up to a previously unreached degree of detail.
