CITEC Media

The Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) was founded at Bielefeld University as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Government and the state governments. The Excellence Initiative supports top-level university research and improves its international visibility. The scientists at CITEC have a vision of interactive tools that are intuitive and easy to operate -- ranging from everyday appliances to robots. Future machines should be orientated towards people instead of -- as hitherto -- visa versa. These challenges can only be mastered through interdisciplinary collaboration between the most diverse fields of study. Thus CITEC enlists the faculties of Biology, Linguistics and Literature, Physics, Psychology, Sport Science, and Technology.

The video demonstrates our research in bimanual manipulation and combines work from unconstrained grasping of objects, learning of manipulation manifolds and bimanual robot control. A screw cap jar is given to the robot at an arbitrary location in space, which is recognized with the aid of a visual marker. In order to open the cap, the jar is passed to the supporting hand and finally the cap is unscrewed employing a trained manipulation trajectory in a feedforward fashion.

A robot's head is important both for directional sensors and, in human-directed robotics, as the single most visible interaction interface. However, designing a robot's head faces contradicting requirements when integrating powerful sensing with social expression. Furher, reactions of the general public show that current head designs often cause negative user reactions and distract from the functional capabilities. Therefore, we present a novel anthropomorphic robot head called "Flobi", which combines state-of-the-art sensing functionality with an exterior that elicits a sympathetic emotional response. It can display primary and secondary emotions in a human-like way, to enable intuitive human-robotinteraction.To facilitate further research on facial appearance,the exterior is fully modular and replaceable. While current state-of-the-art still requires trade-offs when integrating sensing and social expression, Flobi has been designed to enable service robotic applications, with highresolution,wide-angle stereo vision, gyroscope motion compensation and stereo audio. For ease of integration, the head is selfcontained, including 18 actuators, sensors and control boards, all in a human-head sized package.