Anthropomatics - the science of building smart artifacts for humans

Anthropomatics addresses the symbiosis between humans and machines, focusing on a deeper understanding of the cooperation, interaction and coexistence between humans and machines stimulating and strengthen advanced and deep research in response to the challenges of increasingly smart environments and multimodal access to various complex technical systems. At KIT the Focus Anthropomatics and Robotics - APR has been set up by a number of research groups focusing on the research field of Anthropomatics and Robotics with more than 250 researchers. Modelling humans and their capabilities requires a deep understanding of the principle of biomechanics and kinematics, as well as the underlaying neural control principles and the perceptive and actuatoric system. Modelling and understanding of the sensomotoric mechanisms, learning and developement of skills and cognititve capabilities to enable humans to interact with the world is of high importance to design technical systems operating closely and interactively with humans via various modalities like speech, haptics, vision, grasping and locomotion. Typical research fields are related to active vision, interpretation of scenes and human activities, recognition and tracking technologies multimodal & perceptual user interfaces, understanding and translation of speech. Complementary research needed is related to the retrieval & access and summarization of multimedia data sources, translation of spoken text, context aware learning computers, implicit services and many more. The robotics application field ranges from interactive industrial robotics, service robotic companions, humanoids and medical robotics. In all domains the integrating aspects are focusing on algorithms processing real word data as well as open self-organizing architectures which allow autonomy, skill and task learning as well as interaction with humans. Our research emphasizes the critical path from basic understanding of cognitive processes and robotics foundations to applications in various domains. The research includes new approaches to sensor and actuator methodologies, foundations of machine perception, motion and action planning algorithms, simulation and computer graphics, robot machine learning, speech recognition and understanding, multimodal man-machine interaction, and many others. APR addresses the needs of humans in smart living environments and robotics focusing on both, basic foundations and applications. The focus has an intellectual center point on Anthropomatics and a commitment to Robotics as a new human centered discipline. The research is to explore new ideas and to build systematically systems which reflect human daily needs and a basic understanding of intelligent robots and adaptive safe system behaviour in general. Such cognitive robots are able to do tasks skillfully and efficiently together with humans, and they should be able to operate in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Furthermore, future robots should discover new things and learn new capabilities and knowledge about their environment and they should be able to reason about the effects of their actions and interventions. Thus, the basic capabilities to perform intelligent actions in the real world are perception, cognition, locomotion and skillful manipulation. The humanoid robot series ARMAR is used to illustrate recent research and achieved results in the field.