Dr. Kai O. Arras

Robert Bosch GmbH, Renningen

Tuesday, May 16, 2017, 11:30

Room 01-012, Georges-Köhler-Allee 102, Freiburg 79110, Germany

The talk will give a brief overview and present examples from our robotics research activities at Bosch Corporate Research. We will focus on our activities in multi-modal human detection and tracking and analysis from RGB-D data, mobile robot motion planning under kinodynamic constraints and data-driven methods to learn to predict the cost-to-go distance metric for RRT-based motion planners, and ways to learn socially normative driving behaviors for mobile robots in crowds from demonstrations. We will finally report on the deployment of these techniques in a large-scale project in which a robot was guiding transfer passengers through a busy airport at Schiphol, Amsterdam.

Dr. Kai O. Arras is leading the robotics activities in Bosch Corporate Research (CR), the BOSCH Group unit that carries on basic research activities: more than 1400 associates work on technological breakthroughs in fields such as software development, robotics, artificial intelligence or engine management.

The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services. It employs roughly 390,000 associates worldwide (as of December 31, 2016). The company generated sales of 73.1 billion euros in 2016. Its operations are divided into four business sectors: Mobility Solutions, Industrial Technology, Consumer Goods, and Energy and Building Technology.

Short CV of the speaker:
- Head of robotics research and Chief Expert robotics at Bosch
- Coordinator of FP7-SPENCER
- Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, University of Freiburg
- DFG Junior Research Group Leader, Founder Social Robotics Laboratory, University of Freiburg
- Senior Research Scientist, Evolution Robotics (now iRobot), Pasadena, USA
- Post-doc at AIS, University of Freiburg and CAS, KTH Stockholm
- Dr. degree from EPFL, EE diploma from ETHZ