SFB 1320:  EASE – Everyday Activity Science and Engineering

• Subject Area: Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering
• Term: since 2017
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329551904

Recently we have witnessed the first robotic agents performing everyday manipulation activities such as loading a dishwasher and setting a table. While these agents successfully accomplish specific instances of these tasks, they only perform them within the narrow range of conditions for which they have been carefully designed. They are still far from achieving the human ability to autonomously perform a wide range of everyday tasks reliably in a wide range of contexts. In other words, they are far from mastering everyday activities. Mastering everyday activities is an important step for robots to become the competent (co-)workers, assistants, and companions who are widely considered a necessity for dealing with the enormous challenges our aging society is facing.We propose Everyday Activity Science and Engineering (EASE), a fundamental research endeavor to investigate the cognitive information processing principles employed by humans to master everyday activities and to transfer the obtained insights to models for autonomous control of robotic agents. The aim of EASE is to boost the robustness, efficiency, and flexibility of various information processing subtasks necessary to master everyday activities by uncovering and exploiting the structures within these tasks.Everyday activities are by definition mundane, mostly stereotypical, and performed regularly. The core research hypothesis of EASE is that robots can achieve mastery by exploiting the nature of everyday activities. We intend to investigate this hypothesis by focusing on two core principles: The first principle is narrative-enabled episodic memories (NEEMs), which are data structures that enable robotic agents to draw knowledge from a large body of observations, experiences, or descriptions of activities. The NEEMs are used to find representations that can exploit the structure of activities by transferring tasks into problem spaces that are computationally easier to handle than the original spaces. These representations are termed pragmatic everyday activity manifolds (PEAMs), analogous to the concept of manifolds as low-dimensional local representations in mathematics. The exploitation of PEAMs should enable agents to achieve the desired task performance while preserving computational feasibility.The vision behind EASE is a cognition-enabled robot capable of performing human-scale everyday manipulation tasks in the open world based on high-level instructions and mastering them.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Current projects

• 01 - Sensorimotor and Causal Human Activity Models for Cognitive Architectures (Project Heads Didelez, Vanessa ;  Schill, Kerstin ;  Zachmann, Gabriel ;  Zetzsche, Christoph )
• 02 - Discriminative and Generative Human Activity Models for Cognitive Architectures (Project Heads Herrmann, Manfred ;  Schill, Kerstin ;  Schultz, Tanja )
• 03 - Decision Making for Cognitive Architectures – Neuronal Signatures and Behavioral Data (Project Heads von Helversen, Ph.D., Bettina ;  Herrmann, Manfred ;  Schultz, Tanja )
• 04 - Embodied semantics for the language of action and change: Combining analysis, reasoning and simulation (Project Heads Bateman, Ph.D., John ;  Malaka, Rainer )
• 05 - Ontologies with Abstraction (Project Heads Bateman, Ph.D., John ;  Lutz, Carsten )
• 07 - Principles of Metareasoning for Everyday Activities (Project Heads Bateman, Ph.D., John ;  Malaka, Rainer )
• 08 - CRAM 2.0 — a 2nd generation cognitive robot architecture for accomplishing everyday manipulation tasks (Project Heads Beetz, Ph.D., Michael ;  Cheng, Gordon ;  Vernon, David )
• 09 - Multi-cue perception supported by background knowledge (Project Head Frese, Udo )
• 10 - A knowledge representation and reasoning framework for robot prospection in everyday activity (Project Heads Beetz, Ph.D., Michael ;  Zachmann, Gabriel )
• 11 - Cognition-enabled execution of everyday actions (Project Heads Albu-Schäffer, Alin ;  Beetz, Ph.D., Michael )
• 12 - Episodic memory for everyday manual activities (Project Heads Beetz, Ph.D., Michael ;  Ritter, Helge )
• 13 - Fault-Tolerant Manipulation Planning and Failure Handling (Project Head Leidner, Daniel )
• 14 - Project management and central services (Project Head Beetz, Ph.D., Michael )
• 15 - Integrated research training group (Project Heads Beetz, Ph.D., Michael ;  Langer, Hagen )
• 16 - Information infrastructures (Project Heads Beetz, Ph.D., Michael ;  Breiter, Andreas ;  Langer, Hagen )
• 17 - Laboratory infrastructure support (Project Head Langer, Hagen )

Completed projects

• 02 - Mining and explicating instructions for everyday activities (Project Heads Bateman, Ph.D., John ;  Malaka, Rainer )
• 06 - Spatial reasoning in everyday activity (Project Heads Bhatt, Mehul ;  Schultheis, Holger )
• 06 - Formalizations and properties of plans (Project Heads Drechsler, Rolf ;  Große, Daniel )

• Applicant Institution: Universität Bremen
• Participating Institution: Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI); Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS); Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR) ; Institut für Robotik und Mechatronik; Leibniz-Institut für Präventionsforschung und Epidemiologie - BIPS GmbH
• Participating University: Technische Universität München (TUM); Universität Bielefeld
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Michael Beetz, Ph.D.