02.07.2010
23-year-old Ph.D student develops intelligent barkeeping robot
The doctoral candidate Oliver Kroemer and his barkeeping robot (© Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics)
Where will you find a robot that can mix drinks and work as a barkeeper? Answer: At the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. The robot was built by 23-year-old doctoral candidate Oliver Kroemer. Tasks that are very simple for people to carry out can entail a huge amount of programming work for a robot. A glass must be gripped in just the right way - not so hard that it breaks, and not so loosely that it falls through the fingers. The right glass among many other glasses and bottles has to be reached for and filled with just the right drink mix. Kroemer has now won a prize for the best research results for his work at the annual International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO) held in Portugal. The best work is chosen from the around 1,000 publications which are submitted to the competition every year. Kroemer is one of the youngest winners.
Grasping is one of the most important capabilities needed by future service robots. Classic robotics develops machines which are only tailored to carry out very specific tasks. In order to pick up a specific object from among several others traditional robot technology worked with an appropriate point and a movement planner to grip the target object. This system required a great deal of extremely precise information about the environment and very long computation times. Oliver Kroemer goes one step further: In his work he proposes techniques in which the robot can modify the programmed and learned movements itself in order to adapt them to each specific situation.
The 23-year-old scientist was born in Germany, but has lived for many years in various other countries: in the USA, in Norway and in England: In England he studied engineering at the University of Cambridge. Since January 2009 he has been working in the Tübingen Robot Learning Lab with Jan Peters.
http://www.robot-learning.de/Member/OliverKroemer
