Coordinators: Alois Knoll, Dirk Wollherr

Research area D addresses the action production aspects of cognition in technical systems. These aspects include the realization of motion and manipulation skills, the context-specific selection of the appropriate actions, the commitment to courses of activity based on foresight, and specific action capabilities enabling competent joint human-robot action.

To generate high performance, safe, and advisable behavior, area D integrates action planning and control for locomotion, manipulation and full body motions. The planning and control system should be capable of working with minimal, non-technical and qualitative descriptions of goals and tasks. High performance and safe operation will enable close cooperation with humans. Another focus is to enable cognitive robots to accomplish complex jobs in changing and partly unknown environments; to manage several jobs at a time, to resolve conflicts between interfering jobs, and to act appropriately inunexpected and novel situations. They even have to reconsider theirc ourse of action in the light of new information. The long-termvision is hence to develop action control methods/mechanisms and a design methodology to be embedded into self-organising cognitive architectures.