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Speaker:

Michael Beetz

Content:

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. This is partly due to humans having developed their brains
into computational and control devices that facilitate
knowledge-informed decision making, perspective taking, envisioning
activities and their consequences, and predictive control. Brains
orchestrate these learning and reasoning mechanisms in order to
produce flexible, adaptive, and reliable behaviour in real-time.

Household chores are an activity domain where the superiority of the
cognitive mechanisms in the brain and their role in competent activity
control is particularly evident. In this course, I will give an
overview of how cognitive mechanisms that are to enable autonomous
robots to produce flexible, reliable and high-performance behavior for
everyday manipulation activities. The course will step through the "cognition-enabled
perception-action loop" for robot control. I will
describe various capabilities including ones for semantic 3D object
perception, knowledge processing, plan-based execution control, and
perception-guided manipulation.

CV:

Michael Beetz is a professor for Computer Science at the Department of
Informatics of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and heads the
Intelligent Autonomous Systems group. He is vice coordinator of the

German national cluster of excellence COTESYS (Cognition for Technical
Systems) where he is also co-coordinator of the research area
``Knowledge and Learning''.

Michael Beetz received his diploma degree in Computer Science with
distinction from the University of Kaiserslautern. He received his
MSc, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1993, 1994, and
1996 and his Venia Legendi from the University of Bonn in
2000. Michael Beetz was a member of the steering committee of the
European network of excellence in AI planning (PLANET) and
coordinating the research area ``robot planning''. He is associate
editor of the AI Journal, program chair of the robotics track at AAMAS
2010, and workshop chair at AAAI 2010. He is also principal
investigator of a number of research projects in the area of AI-based
robot control. His research interests include plan-based control of
robotic agents, knowledge processing and representation for robots,
integrated robot learning, and cognitive perception.