Please see my most up-to-date homepage at the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab at the University of Southern California. That's also where you will find my an up-to-date list of publications.

Here at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group at the Technische Universität München. I did my PhD on "Tailoring Robot Actions to Task Contexts using Action Models"  from 2002-2007, and was a postdoctoral researcher in the CogMan project ("Cognitive Models of Everyday Manipulation Tasks") in 2008/2009. 

Former Research Projects

• CogMan : The CogMan project (1) develops computational and control models of pick-and-place tasks in the context of everyday manipulation activities in human environments, (2) implements the model into a control system for the kitchen scenario, and (3) empirically analyzes the impact of this control model on the flexibility, robustness, adaptability, and naturality of the robot behavior.

• Agilo : Robotic soccer has become a standard 'real-world' testbed for autonomous multi robot control. In robot soccer (mid-size league) two teams of four autonomous robots --- one goal keeper and three field players --- play soccer against each other. The soccer field is four by nine meters big. The key characteristics of mid-size robot soccer are that the robots are completely autonomous. Consequently, all sensing and all action selection is done onboard of the individual robots. Skillful play requires our robots to recognize objects, such as other robots, field lines, and goals, and even entire game situations. In the AGILO project we investigate how probabilistic visuomotoric autonomous robot controllers that are capable of learning can meet these challenges. The AGILO robot controllers employ game state estimation and situated action selection based on automatically learned control mechanisms.

• Face Image Analysis : As robots emerge from their classical domain - factories - to be included in every day life, they need to gain new abilities besides those needed in manufacturing. They need not only to support humans, but also be able to socialize with their users to enhance the interactant experience and allow for social bonding. Recent progress in the field of Computer Vision allows intuitive interaction via gesture or facial expressions between humans and technical systems. Recent research aims at enabling machines to utilize communication channels natural to human beings, such as gesture or facial expressions. Humans interpret emotion from video and audio information and heavily rely on this information during every-day communication. Therefore, knowledge about human behavior, intention, and emotion is necessary to construct convenient human-machine interaction mechanisms. The human face provides much of the information that is passed between humans in every-day communication. Although most of this information is passed on a subconscious level, we still rely on the interaction partner's facial expression to determine emotional state or attention to form a prediction of his or her reaction.