Title: Everyday Activity and Science Engineering (EASE)
Summary: Recently we have witnessed the first robotic agents performing everyday manipulation activities. 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. We propose Everyday Activity Science and Engineering (EASE), a fundamental research endeavour to investigate the 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.
Bio: 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 AIbased control methods for robotic agents, with a focus on human-scale everyday manipulation tasks. With 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. 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. From 2006 to 2011 Michael Beetz was vice-coordinator of the German excellence cluster CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems), from 2012 to 2016 coordinator of the European FP7 research project RoboHow (Web-enabled and Experiment-based Cognitive Robots that learn complex Everyday Manipulation Tasks) and since 2017 coordinator of the German Collaborative Research Centre EASE (Everyday Activity, Science and Engineering). His research interests include plan-based control of robotic agents, knowledge processing and representation for robots, integrated robot learning, and cognitive perception.
