Max Planck Institutes for Biological Cybernetics and for Intelligent Systems

The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics is studying signal and information processing in the brain. The Department for Human Perception, Cognition and Action is concerned with the fundamental processes of human perception. During the tour we will introduce you to various research groups: the Autonomous Robotics and Human-Machine Systems group, including the research on control of multiple autonomous aerial vehicles (quadrotors) and haptic human-robot interfaces; the Motion Perception in Vehicle Simulation, comprising the Cyber Motion Simulator, an 8-DoFs highly customized KUKA KR-500 robot with a closed actuated cabin; and the Perception and Action in Virtual Environments group.

The aim of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is to understand the principles of perception, action and learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems. During the tour the Department for Empirical Inference will introduce you to the Robot Learning Lab. There, starting from theoretically sound robotic control structures for task representation and execution, the researchers replace analytic modules by more flexible learned ones. To this end, they tackle problems such as accurate, but compliant execution, learning of elementary behaviors, hierarchical composition of behaviors, and parsing complex demonstrations into elementary behaviors.
See https://tuebingen.mpg.de/en/homepage.html

Fraunhofer IPA (Stuttgart)

With some 350 researchers Fraunhofer IPA is one of the largest research institutes within the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and belongs to the leading research institutes in the field of robotics and automation. Fraunhofer IPA is engaged in developing solutions for organizational and technological challenges in the production sector of industrial companies. Robotics related activities encompass all the subjects connected with robot deployment and automatable production processes, as well as the development of robot systems for the industrial and non-industrial (service robotics) domains. Examples are the development of new processes, high-dynamics sensor-actor applications and production cell set ups. Outstanding fields of recent robot innovation have been bin-picking solutions, human robot cooperation, mobile manipulation, and robot assistants (Care-O-bot). See https://www.ipa.fraunhofer.de/

Schedule (6th May, 2013)