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Motivation, Scope, Objective

High performance robot arms are faster, more accurate, and stronger than humans. Yet many manipulation tasks that are easily performed by humans as part of their daily life are well beyond the capabilities of such robots. The main reason for this superiority is that humans can rely upon neural information processing and control mechanisms which are tailored for performing complex motor skills, adapting to uncertain environments and to not imposing a danger to surrounding humans. As we are working towards autonomous service robots operating and performing manipulation in the presence of humans and in human living and working environments, the robots must exhibit similar levels of flexibility, compliance, and adaptivity.

The goal of this Dagstuhl seminar is to make a big step towards pushing robot manipulation forward such that robot assisted living can become a concrete vision for the future. In order to achieve this goal, the computational aspects of everyday manipulation tasks need to be well-understood and the interaction of perceptual, learning, reasoning, planning, and control mechanisms thoroughly investigated. The challenges to be met include cooperation with humans, uncertainty in both task and environments, real-time action requirements, and the use of tools. The challenges cannot be met by merely improving the software engineering and programming techniques. Rather the systems need built-in capabilities to deal with these challenges. Looking at natural intelligent systems, the most promising approach for handling them is to equip the systems with more powerful cognitive mechanisms.

The Dagstuhl Seminar Cognition, Control and Learning for Robot Manipulation in Human Environments brings together a multi- and interdisciplinary group of internationally renowned and young researchers who successfully investigate the integration of cognition, control and learning methods for robotic manipulation.

The goal of the Dagstuhl seminar is to make significant progress towards closing the gap between human and robot manipulation in uncertain environments inhabited by humans. During the first part of the workshop, we will ask you to present your research work and the research issues you address in the context of a common application scenario: a humanoid robot performing household chores including setting the table, preparing meals, and cleaning up. These presentations will acquaint participants with the research areas of other participants. They will also establish the state of the art in the areas relevant to the theme of the work, i.e., neuroscience, cognitive psychology, robot control theory, computer science/artificial intelligence, cognitive vision/perception, and machine learning.

The seminar workshop will consist of group discussions in which the general objectives described in the previous section will be translated into specific scientific questions, competing solutions to open problems, grand challenges, application-specific approaches, etc. Besides the impact of the seminar on the participating researchers we plan on producing a roadmap for research on cognitive robot manipulation systems in the presence of humans; a final report of the workshop summarizing the most important results of the discussions and a Springer LNAI book representing the state-of-the-art in cognition, learning and control in human-robot cohabited environments. This book will consist of a collection of papers from the seminar.

 

Classification

  • Artificial intelligence
  • Robotics
  • Machine learning
  • Cognition

 

Keywords

  • Manipulation
  • Cognition
  • Control
  • Learning
  • Humanoid robot
  • Unstructured environments
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