Robots and other complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) sense, process, and react to information from the physical world. They must operate safely even in the presence of uncertainties and resource constraints. To enable advanced robotics and CPS applications, research in this area tackles a wide range of issues including visual perception, inference from empirical data, motor learning and control, and the design, implementation, and verification of safe and performant CPS.
Groups and Researchers in this Field
Dynamic Locomotion
Alexander Badri-Sprowitz is leading the independent research group Dynamic Locomotion at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany. He is interested in the underlying mechanisms of dynamic legged locomotion in animals, especially aspects of animal biomechanics, morphology, and neurocontrol. To test biomechanical and control models he and his team are developing legged robots and their computer models. They apply legged robots as research platforms to produce rich, high-dimensional experimental data under realistic conditions. They can cross-check the gathered data with biomechanical data of running animals. This eventually allows them to identify individual components, and potential relationships between components.His interest spans from bioinspired and biomimicking robot locomotion, bioinspired approaches to sensor design, learning locomotion, to understanding locomotion biomechanics in animals and robots. Read more
Michael J. Black is one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he leads the Perceiving Systems Department. His research addresses a variety of topics relating to computer vision and perception: the statistics of natural scenes and their motion; articulated human motion pose estimation and tracking; the estimation of human body shape from images and video; the representation and detection of motion discontinuities; and the estimation of optical flow. His early work on optical flow has been widely used in Hollywood films. He also does research on neural engineering for brain-machine interfaces and neural prostheses. He is an honorary professor at the University of Tübingen, visiting professor at ETH Zürich, and adjunct professor (research) at Brown University. Read more
Björn Brandenburg leads the Real-Time Systems group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. His main research interests are real-time systems, operating systems, synchronization protocols, and embedded systems, with a focus on the design and implementation of systems that are robust, efficient, and amenable to a priori analysis. To this end, the group engages in both systems building and the development of novel analysis methods. As a result of his work with OS kernels, he is also interested in the construction, testing, validation, and performance evaluation of operating systems and other complex systems software. Read more
Wenqi Hu is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His research interest is in developing various small-scale Robotics for environmental, biomechanical, and biomedical applications. His group focuses on resolving the scientific challenge of achieving unprecedented robotic performance by developing smart robotic materials and then integrating them into complex functional robotic systems. Read more
