Research Statement

Humans, Robots & A.I.

Our goal as researchers is to advance the scientific and technological foundations for creating intelligent machines capable of autonomous interaction and learning in the world of their human creators. We believe this can only be achieved by the co-design of embodiment and intelligence, jointly forming the driving force of advancement. For this, new systems, sensors and materials need to be combined with the vast possibilities of control and machine learning algorithms, ever-increasing computing power, and high-speed network communication. The coming generations of machines will substantially increase our quality of life and work, collectively augment the human scientific intellect and experimentation bandwidth to exponentially accelerate knowledge discovery processes, and enable the cooperative exploration of unknown terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. Overall, such systems will form in diverse forms and functions the technological backbone in the globally and ubiquitously hyper-connected cyber-societies of the 21st century.

In our group, we bridge the disciplines of control, robotics, collective machine learning, and human motor intelligence. Our exploratory urge at the frontiers of the known pushes the envelope in these disciplines and allows us to design the fundamental principles for engineering artificial intelligence and intelligent robots. Our robot assistants support the elderly in times of demographic change or human workers in the coming human-centered industrial revolution. We develop brain controlled symbiotic prostheses and exoskeletons that allow disabled people to compensate for lost motor functionalities. The cooperative, networked laboratory helpers provide arbitrarily scalable experimentation to human scientists, allowing for unprecedented knowledge discovery accelerations in molecule synthesis, drug synthesis or cell analysis. The environmental intelligence formed with heterogeneous robot teams enable autonomous habitat exploration, monitoring and intervention on land, water and air. In this detailed Research Statement, we describe our science agenda and contributions across seven distinct research fields that operationalize above vision.