This includes understanding natural language and multimodal interaction through the acquisition and interpretation of visual, acoustic, and haptic signals, as well as biosignals to facilitate natural and intuitive human-machine interfaces and collaboration between humans and machines/robots. In addition, it includes research on telepresence methods and AR/VR technologies for robot control in remote and/or inhuman environments, as well as in medicine.

Focus on integrating AI, informatics and mechatronics for the engineering of human-centered humanoid robots with versatile abilities and holistic functional hardware-software architectures. The conducted research addresses the mechano-informatics of robotics, dexterous grasping and manipulation, learning from human observation, from interaction and collaboration with humans, and from sensorimotor experience.

Transfer of knowledge from humanoid robotics to prosthetics, orthotics and exoskeleton research to develop symbiotic wearable robots for augmentation of humans’ motor abilities at home and work and for compensation of motor limitations. A special focus is laid on novel soft designs compatible with the human body morphology, and on novel interfaces to the human body for intuitive and effortless control. Further, research is conducted on the development of assistive technologies for people with visual disabilities at the center for visually impaired persons (SZS).

Methods and systems for minimally invasive, robot-assisted surgery and assistance systems to support surgeons in the operating room of the future. This includes design of innovative systems for surgical robotics, medical image processing and methods for the interpretation of pre-, intra- and postoperative heterogeneous information in robot-assisted surgery.

This includes applications of industrial robots and automation technologies in several application areas such as agile manufacturing and flexible handling, assembly and disassembly, intelligent logistic systems, automated image-based identification and sorting of biomaterials. In addition, safety concepts in industrial setups are investigated by developing real-time trajectory generation methods and collision-free motion planning.

This includes the development of methods and systems for agile and highly flexible and reconfigurable industrial production while taking uncertainty of production requirements and products into account. To this end, novel concepts of future factories in terms of novel highly flexible robot kinematics and AI-enabled industrialization of immature manufacturing and remanufacturing processes.

The research focuses on real-time perception, motion planning and control for self-driving automobiles including the design of holistic hardware-software architecture for safety-critical applications as well as methods for testing and validation. This research has a broad scope at KIT, which is also covered by the research activities of the KIT Center “Mobility Systems.”

The research activities in this topic are accompanied with a serious consideration of ethical, legal and social implications of robotics and autonomous systems as we consider these their acceptance by the society. This consideration concerns, e.g., research on wearable robotics as well as autonomous driving.