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GRASP Special Seminar: Michael Beetz, Technische Universität Muenchen, “Everyday Activity Science and Engineering”

May 8, 2017 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

ABSTRACT

Recently we have witnessed the first robotic agents performing everyday manipulation activities such as loading a dishwasher and setting a table. While these agents successfully accomplish specific instances of these tasks, they only perform them within the narrow range of conditions for which they have been carefully designed. They are still far from achieving the human ability to autonomously perform a wide range of everyday tasks reliably in a wide range of contexts. In other words, they are far from mastering everyday activities. Mastering everyday activities is an important step for robots to become the competent (co-)workers, assistants, and companions who are widely considered a necessity for dealing with the enormous challenges our aging society is facing.
 
I will talk about Everyday Activity Science and Engineering (EASE), a planned fundamental research endeavor to investigate cognitive information processing principles employed by humans to master everyday activities and to transfer the obtained insights to models for autonomous control of robotic agents. The aim of EASE is to boost the robustness, efficiency, and flexibility of various information processing subtasks necessary to master everyday activities by uncovering and exploiting the structures within these tasks.

Everyday activities are by definition mundane, mostly stereotypical, and performed regularly.  The core research hypothesis of EASE is that robots can achieve mastery by exploiting the nature of everyday activities.  We intend to investigate this hypothesis by focusing on two core principles: The first principle is narrative-enabled episodic memories (NEEMs), which are data structures that enable robotic agents to draw knowledge from a large body of observations, experiences, or descriptions of activities.  The NEEMs are used to find representations that can exploit the structure of activities by transferring tasks into problem spaces that are computationally easier to handle than the original spaces. These representations are termed pragmatic everyday activity manifolds (PEAMs), analogous to the concept of manifolds as low-dimensional local representations in mathematics.  The exploitation of PEAMs should enable agents to achieve the desired task performance while preserving computational feasibility.

The vision behind EASE is a cognition-enabled robot capable of performing human-scale everyday manipulation tasks in the open world based on high-level instructions and mastering them.

Presenter

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Michael Beetz is a professor for Computer Science at the Faculty for Mathematics & Informatics of the University Bremen and head of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI). IAI investigates AI-based control methods for robotic agents, with a focus on human-scale everyday manipulation tasks. With his openEASE, a web-based knowledge service providing robot and human activity data, Michael Beetz aims at improving interoperability in robotics and lowering the barriers for robot programming. Due to this the IAI group provides most of its results as open-source software, primarily in the ROS software library.

Michael Beetz received his diploma degree in Computer Science with distinction from the University of Kaiserslautern. His MSc, MPhil, and PhD degrees were awarded by 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 was vice-coordinator of the German Cluster of Excellence “Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys)”. He was also associate editor of the AI Journal. His research interests include plan-based control of robotic agents, knowledge processing and representation for robots, integrated robot learning, and cognitive perception.

Details

Date:
May 8, 2017
Time:
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Event Category: