Enabling robotic service agents to perform natural language instructions such as "flip the pancake" or "push the spatula under
the pancake" requires us to equip robots with large amounts of knowledge. To perform such tasks adequately, robots must,
for instance, be able to infer the appropriate tool to use, how to grasp it and how to operate it. They must, in particular, not push
the whole spatula under the pancake, i.e. they must not interpret instructions literally but rather recover the intended meaning.
In this talk, I will present some of our ongoing research in the European project ROBOHOW, in which we transfer these ideas to
autonomous robotics in order to realize knowledge-intensive robot control programs that use the world-wide web as a comprehensive
source of knowledge. I will discuss the feasibility of acquiring new plan schemata for web instructions formulated in natural language using
video instructions, games with a purpose, and kinesthetic teaching as additional information sources.
Short bio:
Prof. Michael
Beetz (http://ai.uni-bremen.de/team/michael_beetz)
holds the chair on Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Mathematics and
Computer Science at the University
of Bremen and heads the
research group "Intelligent Autonomous Systems". From 2004 to 2012 he
has been professor for computer science at the Department of Informatics of
Technische Universität München and headed the Intelligent Autonomous Systems
group. He has been the vice coordinator of the German cluster of excellence
CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems) from 2007-2011 and is coordinator of
the EU FP7 integrating project ROBOHOW. Michael Beetz was a member of the
steering committee of the European network of excellence in AI planning
(PLANET) and coordinated the research area robot planning. He was associate
editor of the Artificial Intelligence journal. He is also principal
investigator of a number of national and European research projects in the area
of AI-based robot control.
Michael Beetz received his diploma degree in Informatics with distinction from the University of Kaiserslautern. He received his MSc, MPhil and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1993, 1994 and 1996 and his Venia Legendi from the University of Bonn in 2000. His research interests include integrated cognition-enabled robotic systems, plan-based control of autonomous robots, knowledge representation and processing for robots, integrated robot learning and cognitive perception.