Applied and Theoretical Aspects of Robot Intelligence Lab (ATARI)
The holy grail of robotics is to build a system that can move everywhere and manipulate its surroundings. Leveraging tools from optimal control and estimation as well as machine learning, we target building a framework that enables a humanoid robot to perform tasks that humans can do.
In ATARI, we perform research on Applied and Theoretical Aspects of Robot Intelligence. We are interested in answering the following questions:
- How can we enable robots to autonomously plan in new situations and execute them in the real world?
- How can we make sure that robots can safely interact with the environment?
- What does it take to enable continual imtprovement of robot skills in the real world?
our Philosophy
In our group, we aim to contribute to bulding a better future by doing responsible robotics research. As Richard Feynman points out in his seminal essay The Value of Science: Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad -but it does not carry the instructions on how to use it. [...] Our responsibility [as scientists] is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand. [...] It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.
We are committed to open-source our developed software and hardware to be used by the research community. At the same time, we are against any use of our research outputs in any military-related or destructive applications.