Robots are finding their way out of the industrial applications and into our everyday life and today they operate more often in environments shared with humans rather than being kept behind fences. Therefore, it is also of increasing importance for robots to be able to analyze the environment and reason about, e.g., human activities, for generating appropriate behaviors. One strategy for achieving acceptable robots is to analyze and model how humans interact and make use of their space and to transfer these models to robots, e.g., for path planning.

 

In this lecture we will both address some of the enabling technologies that are the prerequisite for the current success stories of robotics and some of the some of the challenges that robots are still facing.