Cognitive Systems and Robotics

Research Rationale

By promoting research into systems that have cognitive functions normally associated with people or animals and which exhibit a high degree of robustness in coping with unpredictable situations, we seek to overcome limitations of today's computers, robots, and other man-made creations to handle simple everyday situations with common sense and to work without pre-programming in natural surroundings, while maintaining and possibly improving the quality of their services.

Unit Mission

We support research on the development and construction of robotic systems and other artificial cognitive systems than can process and interpret various kinds of sensor data (images, speech and other forms of sensor data), and act purposefully and autonomously towards achieving goals. Such systems are to operate in dynamic real-life environments and are to be capable of responding timely and sensibly to gaps in their knowledge and to situations that have not been anticipated at design time.

These systems should learn and develop through individual or social interaction with their environment. The work provides an enabling technology that applies across domains such as industrial and service robotics, automation, image recognition, systems monitoring and control, automated reasoning and decision support, and natural language understanding. The work could furthermore borrow insights from the bio-sciences, and yield innovative insights about perception, understanding, interaction, learning and knowledge representation to further underpin progress towards engineering systems with the desired capabilities.

Artificial Cognitive Systems are at the junction of the cognitive, ICT, and natural sciences.