Prof. Alexandra Kirsch was a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow until 2012. Her research aims at planning and plan execution mechanisms for autonomous robots that assist people in everyday environments. In the context of her IAS fellowship, she focuses on the concept of "expectations" in the execution of everyday activities. Humans constantly make predictions of the world and use this knowledge to decide on a course of actions or detect problems in their activities. In psychology, this capability is believed to be an important factor for the interaction of humans to achieve joint goals. Likewise a robot having expectations about the future development of its environment (including its own actions and the activities of a collaborating human) will be better able to show behavior that feels natural to users. Moreover, comparing expectations with the observed course of actions allows a robot to detect unusual situations without the need to foresee all possible contingencies when programming the robot. Particular challenges in this research are to find appropriate forms of representating relevant knowledge and how to acquire this knowledge automatically. Alexandra Kirsch is now an assistant professor for Human-Computer-Interaction at the University of Tübingen.
Prof. Dongheui Lee was a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow and was active in this Focus Group until 2014. She has transferred to the Focus Group Control and Robotics.
Prof. Kolja Kühnlenz was active in this Focus Group as a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow until 2012. Since 2014, he has been a professor of electrical engineering at Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Prof. Mandayam Srinivasan is the founder and director of the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, informally known as the MIT Touch Lab that has contributed fundamentally to the emergence and growth of the modern field of haptics. He is also a Senior Scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT and is recognized worldwide as an authority on haptic computation, cognition, and communication in humans and machines. As a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow, Dr. Srinivasan investigates the scientific foundations of human haptics and their applications in the development of cognitive technical systems such as next generation computer interfaces and robotic assistants, primarily in collaboration with Prof. Martin Buss and colleagues in the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at TUM. Dr. Srinivasan is also building multidisciplinary connections with other research groups within and beyond TUM interested in different aspects of haptics in fields such as neuroscience, psychophysics, micro-technology, robotics and computer science.
Prof. Angelika Peer was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the TUM Institute of Automatic Control Engineering and was a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow in this TUM-IAS Focus Group. Since 2014, she has been a professor of the University of the West of England, working at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
Dr. Georg von Wichert was a Rudolf Diesel Industry Fellow until 2012. At Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies he is responsible for the Cognitive Autonomous Systems Program. When implementing technical systems targeted at autonomous operation in real-world applications, the environmental complexity, leading to extremely high-dimensional state spaces and the unavoidable uncertainty are the main challenges. The uncertainty related issues have to be addressed by actively controlling the systems current understanding of the world. Handling the complexity of real-world applications requires the ability to reason about the world on different levels of abstraction. Dr. Georg von Wicherts research consequently aims at the realization of “active thinking” as the process of purposefully acquiring information, forming abstracted representations, and using the thus available knowledge to generate robust, goal-directed behavior even in the presence of significant uncertainty. In the context of his IAS fellowship he cooperated especially with Prof. Martin Buss and colleagues in the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering and focused on devising and demonstrating general architectural principles for cognitive control in autonomous systems based on probabilistic approaches and with applications in (among others) supervisory control and service robotics.
Prof. Dirk Wollherr is currently a professor at the TUM Institute of Automatic Control Engineering. As a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow, he was active in this TUM-IAS Focus Group until 2013.
TUM-IAS funded doctoral candidates:
Michael Karg (PhD in 2014), Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
Barbara Kühnlenz (PhD in 2013)
Christina Lichtenthäler (PhD in 2014), Intelligent Autonomous Systems
Andreas Schmid, University College London (UCL) - TouchLab
Bernhard Weber, Automatic Control Engineering
Liu Ziyuan (PhD in 2014)
Publications by the Focus Group