Research Group Cognitive Systems Engineering

Researchers: Sebastian Wrede (head), R. Golombek, M. Götting, M. Johannfunke, S. Krüger

Cognitive robotics is an experimental research activity that combines research efforts in mechanics, electronics, informatics and the cognitive sciences. Creating cognitive robots requires building systems that can adapt their behavior to environments that are complex, rapidly changing, and that can not be completely modeled in preface. Nowadays, many of the resulting challenges can be successfully addressed on the level of individual algorithms or by advanced robotics hardware tuned for specific scenarios.

In order to provide an avenue for robotic systems to become useful in every-day human settings and as a prerequisite for entering the consumer market, these attributes must be ensured on a system level that encompasses the web of skills advanced robots must be capable of. The aim of the cognitive systems engineering group is to investigate software architectures and engineering principles that allow to efficiently integrate, implement and bring together this web of different skills in order to build complex cognitive robotic systems.

Current examples for architectural principles that are investigated in this group are so-called memory architectures that provide memory functionality useful across different tasks and scenarios in order to support learning processes, the transfer of current concepts of event-driven architectures for efficient software integration or the exploitation of autonomic computing concepts for self-regulation in order to increase the autonomy and dependability of robotic systems.

The group is involved in different projects within the CoR-Lab, the CITEC Excellence Cluster and at EU level (in particular FP7 projects AMARSi / HUMAVIPS) utilizing state-of-the-art humanoid robots like ASIMO, NAO and iCub. Besides the conducted research, the operation of these humanoid robots and the education about these research platforms are additional responsibilites of this group.