The increasing digitalization of society and business is seeing the use of robotics also expand into non-industrial applications. In the future, more and more service and assistance robots will support people not only within their own four walls and with nursing care, but also in the public sphere or with difficult or dangerous work. The interaction between humans and these robots in everyday life represents a key challenge here. With this in mind, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research has decided to fund three centers of excellence, each with a different specific application domain for assistance robots.
The RimA transfer center is intended to create a link between the centers and promote an efficient academic as well as technical exchange. The work of the transfer center is led by the FZI Research Center for Information Technology with the involvement of Freie Universität Berlin, TÜV SÜD AG, and the University of Bonn. The overarching goal of the transfer center is to support the partners of the centers and other institutions in transferring new robotic technologies and solutions into everyday life. The “Benchmarking of Assistance Robots” subproject at the University of Bonn focuses above all on the aspect of benchmarks and competitions, but also makes important contributions to the modelling of human-robot interaction and the establishment of a knowledge platform.
“An intensive exchange of experiences, open-source software, and datasets should take place between the centers of excellence via national assistance robot competitions and an open knowledge platform,” explains Prof. Dr. Sven Behnke from the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Bonn. “RimA aims to sustainably advance the interactivity of robots beyond the centers of excellence with benchmarks, competitions, and the knowledge platform, and continuously involve new companies or research partners.”
The Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS) working group, which is led by Behnke, has extensive experience both in developing assistance robots and in robot competitions and benchmarks. The research group’s developments include the anthropomorphic (humanoid) household robots Dynamaid and Cosero, the mobile manipulation robot Momaro, communication robots, humanoid soccer robots, and many other robot systems. The successes at international robot competitions include many first places in the @Home and Soccer leagues of the international RoboCup (2002 to 2019) and first and second places in the Mohamed-bin-Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC 2017 and 2020).
Sven Behnke is a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Areas “Mathematics, Modelling and Simulation of Complex Systems” and “Innovation and Technology for Sustainable Futures” and the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn.