TUM's robot hand for the Artesimit project tum logo Munich skyline in front of the Alps

TU Munich Cogbotlab

Head: Jürgen Schmidhuber,
until 2009 Professor Extraordinarius of Computer Science / Cognitive Robotics at TUM CS (link). Director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA & Professor of AI at USI & Professor SUPSI & Dr. habil. (TUM)

Recent Courses:
SS 2008 & WS 2008/09

Guitarbot
Partners
Local:
Bots
Bipeds
Vision I
Vision II
Sensors
Control
Cars
Mech
CS
Bio
Tools
Comm
Media
Space
LMU
Swiss:
IDSIA
CSEM
Robertino with camera and gripper
Mission: to build robots that learn.
Tools: recurrent networks, Bayesian methods, reinforcement learning, evolution, optimal search, others.
Theory: optimal universal learners, universal Bayesian induction, Kolmogorov complexity, Gödel machines.
robot on robot horse riding off into the sunset
Research:
Publications
Robot learning
Some of the 25 robots
First bot to tie a knot
Recurrent nets
Evolution
Evolve RNNs
Universal learners
Gödel machines
OOPS
Optimal search
Statistical robotics
Reinforcement
Resilience
Metalearning
Curiosity
Hierarchical learning
Attentive vision
Nonlinear ICA
Program evolution
Artificial ants
Algorithmic info
Speed Prior
Digital physics
Beauty
AI
New AI
Converging history?
We are living through a robot population explosion. In 1980 there were just 30,000 robots; in 2002, already 1,000,000, almost half in Japan, one third in Europe, especially in Germany, the world's 2nd-largest market for robots.

But nearly all robots are prewired; they cannot learn from experience like humans do. And the few that adapt usually just react to their current sensory inputs without making use of relevant events further in the past. Is there an optimal way of learning non-reactive behaviors in general, unknown environments? Our recent theoretical insights affirm that the answer is yes. And our biologically plausible approaches use adaptive recurrent neural networks with internal states to control autonomous robots in realistic, partially observable environments.

Check out the CoTeSys site of Schmidhuber's group in the CoTeSys cluster of excellence! Research topics: artificial curiosity for the DLR artificial hands, behavior evolution for AM's 180cm walking biped, visual attention & unsupervised learning for adaptive robots.

According to Nature's millennium issue, the most influential invention of the 20th century was the one that triggered and sustained the human population explosion: the Haber- Bosch process. Billions of people would not even exist without it.

The robot population explosion is most visible in a few countries where the human one has stopped, and might eventually overtake it, once cognitive robots no longer have to be hardwired but learn by themselves.

Group:
Baier
Bakker
Beringer
Chernov
Einstein*
Felder
Fette
Fernandez
Gagliolo
Gauss*
Gloye
Goedel*
Gomez
Graves
Hutter
Legg
Omlin
Osi
Rückstiess
Ryabko
Sehnke
Poland
Stranieri
Turing*
Wierstra
Urbanek
Weiss
Zhumatiy
Zuse*
*not yet confirmed
Why come to TUM? It is a leader in the fields of automation and robotics, with many unique and expensive robots, and strong connections to industry leaders such as Munich's BMW and Siemens. 14 Nobel laureates (the most recent one of 2005) are associated with Munich, 4 of them with TUM. The FOCUS survey (20 Sept 2004) ranked TUM first among Germany's universities, right ahead of Munich's LMU. On 10/13/2006 both TUM and LMU were selected as two of the three German "Elite Universities" by the "Excellence Initiative" funded by 1.9 billion Euros for the next 5 years. This was prime time news on all German channels.

Fibonacci web design
by J. Schmidhuber

Why come to Munich? It is one of the world's most livable places (ranked 2nd among the world's cities with over a million inhabitants, after Vienna, according to this survey), and gets consistently voted as Germany's most attractive city. Lots of culture & fun, 100,000 students, the world's largest festival (Oktoberfest), the world's oldest & largest technical museum, scenic Bavarian surroundings with lakes, rivers, hills, meadows, bikepaths, castles, and beer gardens, close to major ski areas etc. Schmidhuber has seen the world, and claims there is no more beautiful region than the pre-alpine land between Munich and the Alps. (He is biased though - he was born in Munich.)
Why come to Germany? It is a fine place for scientists and inventors, with a long tradition of fundamental breakthroughs that define today's world, including Western bookprint, the calculator, binary arithmetics & calculus,, watches & other small machines, math a la Gauss, the second industrial revolution based on the combustion engine & the car & the first practical dynamo & electric locomotion, the germ theory of disease, the modern research university, general relativity, quantum physics, population explosion, the transistor, the computer, controlled heavy flight, the helicopter, the jetplane, cruise missiles, uranium fission, X-rays, and innumerable others.
For most of the 20th century Germany boasted more Nobel prizes than any other nation (until 1956; until 1965 if we consider only the laureates' countries of birth; until 1975 if we consider only the sciences). It is still the world's largest exporter. It is also the world's second largest maker and user of robots, after Japan, and birthplace of the first robot cars. Many of its teams became world champions in the RoboCup, the most visible robot competition (more).