Guest Speaker
Michael Beetz
Professor, Technische Universit?t M?nchen
September 12, 2011
Abstract
In recent years we have seen tremendous advances in the mechatronic, sensing and computational infrastructure of robots, enabling them to act faster, stronger and more accurately than humans do. Yet, when it comes to accomplishing manipulation tasks in everyday settings, robots often do not even reach the sophistication and performance of young children. Housework is an activity domain where the superiority of the human cognitive mechanisms and their role in competent activity control is particularly evident.
In this talk I will present our ongoing research, in which we investigate cognitive mechanisms that are to enable autonomous robots to produce flexible, reliable and high-performance behavior for everyday manipulation activities. The talk will concentrate on our framework for cognition-enabled control and the naturalistic specification of manipulation actions and what it takes to execute these specifications competently.
