iros2016-Monday 10/10/2016

Workshop Day

Integrating Multiple Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Techniques in Robotics (MIRROR-16)

The ability of a robotic system to reason about its surroundings, its goals, and its actions, is paramount to developing robots that act autonomously and appropriately. However, the common goal of AI and Robotics researchers to realize intelligent robot systems has not yet led to fully AI-driven robots, in spite of great attainments in both research areas. One of the major hindrances is the lack of attention to integrated reasoning. This is the problem of jointly reasoning about heterogeneous and inter-dependent aspects of the world, expressed in different forms and at different levels of abstraction. The focus of this workshop is on the general techniques, the applications, the scopes, and the challenges that lie behind the integration of several reasoning systems.

This workshop will stimulate the development of much needed methodologies and tools for addressing the integrated reasoning problem in a systematic way. Such methodologies and tools are necessary to avoid two important and well-known issues in Robotics. First, systems composed of different modules implementing specialized algorithms which are integrated in an ad-hoc manner are more difficult to replicate. Second, the underlying integration techniques, often a big part of realization, cannot be used to build other integrated reasoning systems. These significantly hinder advancement in the field of intelligent robotics. This workshop is instrumental in bringing these problems to light. It will provide a venue for Robotics and AI researchers to exchange the lessons learned from different special cases of integrated reasoning. This will foster interest in general methods that address different applications, robot systems, and requirements.

http://aass.oru.se/Agora/MIRROR-2016/

Virtual Neurorobotics in the Human Brain Project

http://www.fzi.de/en/research/projekt-details/human-brain-project/iros-2016-neurorobotics-workshop/

Full Day Workshop MoFT9 
Mon, Oct 10, 08:30-18:00, Room 106

Organizers

Stefan Ulbrich (FZI Research Center for Information Technology), Rüdiger Dillmann (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Cecilia Laschi (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna), Egidio Falotico (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna)

Abstract

IROS 2016 Tutorial “Virtual Neurorobotics in the Human Brain Project”

Neurorobotics is quite a young discipline that applies insights from research in computational neuroscience and medicine to robotics. The benefits from this interdisciplinary approach are two-fold. On the one hand, robotics provides embodiments that can be used to develop principles for and evaluate functional neural circuits or even models of whole brains. On the other hand, robotics research will also greatly benefit from neuroscience with respect to creating adaptive and robust control and perception principles. One of the problems researchers in this field are facing is the limited access to hardware (e.g., robots or novel neuromorphic technologies) which often come at high expenses or limited availability.

To deal with this problem, the Neurorobotics Platform (NRP) in the subproject Neurorobotics of the Human Brain Project has been developed and released to the public earlier this year. It provides access to state-of-the-art tools such as robot and brain simulators, designers for creating experiments, environments, and brain and robot models. Researchers can define and run closed-loop experiments entirely in a web-based application, which runs on many devices, without the need for neither local installations nor administration expertise. Running centralized on high-performance clusters, it also transparently grants its users access to computing resources that are not commonly available. While the NRP mainly targets neurorobotics, is also interesting for roboticists that look for an easy-to-setup virtual experimentation setup.

The objective of this tutorial session is to present this technology, inviting for a constructive discussion about virtual neurorobotics, and also to address further topics with respect to neurorobotics. The tutorial session is divided into invited talks about related topics (virtual neurorobotics, neuromorphic hardware and computational neuroscience and robotics) and a hands-on session in which participants are guided through a tutorial showing the capabilities of the Neurorobotics Platform.

Speakers

F. Röhrbein (Technische Universität München), Guilio Sandini (Italian Institute of Technology), Ansgar Büschges (Univ. of Cologne), Yoshihiko Nakamura (Univ. of Tokyo), Heinrich Bülthoff ( Max Planck), Chris Eliasmith (Univ. of Waterloo)