Learning to Perceive and to Act – Disentangling Tales from (Structured) Latent Space

Abstract: Unsupervised learning is experiencing a renaissance. Driven by an abundance of unlabelled data and the advent of deep generative models, machines are now able to synthesise complex images, videos and sounds. In robotics, one of the most promising features of these models – the ability to learn structured latent spaces – is gradually gaining traction. […]

The Robot Theatre Lab

Abstract: Robots (at least the term Robot) originate from the theatre. What has theatre (anno 2023) to offer the field of HRI? Assistant professor and creative roboticist Edwin Dertien took a brief sabbatical last year to design, build and operate a robot actor for a professional theatre production. In this talk he will share his […]

Academic Track

Perception, Planning, and Learning for Cognitive Robots

Abstract: Cognitive robots need to perceive their environment to act in a goal-directed way. This includes simultaneous localization and mapping, semantic categorization of surfaces, object detection and pose estimation, as well as the perception of persons. In the talk, I will report on efficient methods that we developed for environment perception, based on local multiresolution […]

Robotic contributions to minimally invasive surgery and targeted therapy

Abstract: Starting from a recent analysis of the state of the art, the speaker will introduce the main challenges of surgical robotics, paying attention to the problem of generating therapeutic effects with minimally invasive solutions. She will present case-studies coming from her 25 years of experience in the field. In this research path, contributions from […]