Prof. Dr. Katja Mombaur

Chair in Optimization and Biomechanics for Human Centred Robotics
Director of KIT BioRobotics Lab
Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR)
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
Canada Excellence Research Chair in Human Centred Robotics and Machine Intelligence, University of Waterloo, Canada

Title: Endowing humanoid robots with motion intelligence: the roles of bio-inspiration, optimization and learning

Abstract

In the past years, the field of humanoid robots has seen an amazing progress with many new prototypes being developed in industry as well as in academic labs worldwide. The vision of humanoids truly being able to provide support to humans in a wide range of dirty, dull and dangerous jobs and to becoming a companion or carer of humans gets closer to being fulfilled. However, generating and controlling motions for whole-body - i.e. bipedal – humanoid robots with their nonlinear dynamics with many degrees of freedom, underactuation and inherent instability is still very challenging, and in general humanoids do not yet achieve human motor skill levels.

In this talk, I will give an overview of our research on endowing humanoid robots with motion intelligence or embodied artificial intelligence that makes the robot aware of how it moves in and interacts with its dynamic environment and with humans. As they need to either physically interact with humans or replace human actions, they must be able to predict human behavior, recognize human intent, know how to safely interact with them and how to best support them. In addition, they should convey their motion intent to humans by moving in a human-like way and thus making it easier for humans to interact with the robots.

Our research aims to discover and describe general principles of human movement such as stability and efficiency or optimization principles underlying certain behaviors. We aim not only for qualitative understanding but also for quantitative knowledge about human movement that can be formulated in terms of mathematical models. These can serve as bioinspiration for humanoid motions, but also support understanding of human intent. Building on top of this understanding, we develop efficient computational methods combining model-based methods such as optimization with model-free approaches, that allow to control and improve motions for humanoids adapted to the specific situation.

I will show a range of different motions , which we generated for our Reem-C humoind robot at my lab in Waterloo and which all require an effective coordination of the whole body and control of stability. Motions covered include walking on different terrains, balancing, bimanual manipulation of objects, riding personal transporters and skateboards, natural body language during multimodal communication, and finally close-proximity physical-social human-robot interactions which are important in many applications ranging from dancing to healthcare.

Biography

Katja Mombaur joined the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany in 2023 as Full Professor, Chair for Optimization & Biomechanics for Human-Centred Robotics and Director of the BioRobotics Lab. In addition, she holds an affiliation with the University Waterloo in Canada where she has been Full Professor and Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) for Human-Centred Robotics & Machine Intelligence since 2020. Prior to moving to Canada, she has been a Full Professor at Heidelberg University where she directed the Optimization, Robotics & Biomechanics Chair, as well as the Heidelberg Center for Motion Research. Her international experience includes two years as a visiting researcher at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse and one year at Seoul National University. She studied Aerospace Engineering at the University of Stuttgart and SupAéro in Toulouse and holds a PhD in Mathematics from Heidelberg University.
Katja Mombaur currently serves as the Vice President for Member Activities of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society and co-chair of the TC on Humanoid Robots. She is a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and has actively contributed to the organization of many conferences and workshops, in various roles e.g. as Program Chair of the IEEE RAS Humanoids 2023 conference.
Katja’s research focuses on understanding human movement by a combined approach of model-based optimization and experiments and using this knowledge to improve motions of humanoid robots and the interactions of humans with exoskeletons, prostheses and external physical devices. Her goal is to endow humanoid and wearable robots with motion intelligence that allow them to operate safely in a complex human world. The development of efficient algorithms for motion generation, control and learning is a core component of her research.