Inhalt des Dokuments
New Job Openings!
Friday, 15. November 2019
The RBO Lab is offering two new positions funded by the cluster of excellence -Science of Intelligence. For further information refer to the Open Positions.
New member of the RBO team
Monday, 01. July 2019
Welcome to Aditya Bhatt who has just joined our team!
He recently graduated with an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg. He will be using his knowledge on deep reinforcement learning to tackle the problem of dexterous in-hand manipulation using the RBO Hands 2 and 3.
Welcome to the RBO team
Monday, 03. June 2019
We are very glad to welcome Adrian Sieler to RBO! Adrian's research will focus on machine learning as part of the DFG-funded project Robotics-Specific Machine Learning
Preparing exhibit for the MS Wissenschaft
Thursday, 14. February 2019
Together with the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
in Leipzig we are preparing an exhibit of the
RBO Hand 2 on the MS Wissenschaft - Das schwimmende Science Center.
Paper accepted to ICRA 2019
Friday, 01. February 2019
Congratulations to Vincent Wall and Oliver Brock for their accepted paper on Multi-Task Sensorization of Soft Actuators Using Prior Knowledge at ICRA 2019, May 2019, in Montreal, Canada
Science of Intelligence is hiring!
The excellence cluster Science of Intelligence is currently looking to hire main office staff, including the Managing Director, Administrative Assistant and Finance Officer!
If you're interested, please refer to their open positions website.
Science of Intelligence (SCIoI) granted for funding!
Thursday, 27. September 2018
The excellence initiative application Science of Intelligence (SCIoI) got granted for funding. Find out more on the official webpage.
Goodbye Can Erdogan
Friday, 01. June 2018
As a postdoctoral researcher Can contributed to our lab in different disciplines e.g. human grasping, motion and grasp planning,.. as part of the SOMA Horizon 2020 project. We wish him a good start in his new position!
CASP13 is live!
Wednesday, 02. May 2018
RBO is participating in the 13th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP 13). CASP is a bi-annual blind study to assess the current state-of-the-art in protein structure prediction (PSP). We participate with our improved RBO Aleph pipeline for PSP and our improved EPSILON-CP pipeline for contact prediction. Furthermore, for human targets, we will test a radically different/new approach to PSP with RBO-Bet.
New member of the RBO team
Wednesday, 02. May 2018
We welcome the new member of our team: Steffen Puhlmann.
He recently graduated at the department of Computational Neuroscience with his master thesis „Development of place cells and grid cells in recurrent networks“. In our lab Steffen's research will focus on Soft-Hand building, sensor design and In-Hand manipulation.
PhD Thesis Defense by Rico Jonschkowski
Wednesday, 02. May 2018
Congratulations to Rico Jonschkowski who successfully defended his Doctoral Thesis on Learning Robotic Perception Through Prior Knowledge. His thesis has now been published here
Follow up on the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC)
Tuesday, 01. May 2018
An extended journal version of the RSS 2016 paper "Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Building Robotic Systems" is now available:
"Four aspects of building robotic systems: lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge 2015"
Two RBO papers accepted at ICRA18
Tuesday, 01. May 2018
Two RBO papers have been accepted for ICRA 18: "Coordination of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Degrees of Freedom in Soft Robotic Grasping" and "Physics-Based Selection of Informative Actions for Interactive Perception". Congratulations Can, Armin, Clemens, Roberto, and Oliver!
SOMA Milestone reached
Monday, 30. April 2018
We successfully reached MS 4 of the Horizon 2020 SOMA Project "Real-World Demonstrator: SOMA technology is showcased in a demonstration in the context of the two use cases." Video
Welcome Marc Dreilich
Tuesday, 17. April 2018
We welcome Marc Dreilich to our lab! He will support our technical team.
PhD Thesis Defense by Roberto Martin-Martin
Monday, 26. February 2018
Congratulations to Roberto Martin-Martin who successfully defended his Doctoral Thesis on Leveraging problem structure in interactive perception for robot manipulation of constrained mechanisms. He will continue as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.
Goodbye Janika Urig & Welcome Elizabeth Ball
Tuesday, 05. December 2017
We thank Janika Urig for 4 valuable years of cooperation and welcome Elizabeth Ball to the RBO lab. She will take over the administrative work in our laboratory.
New member of the RBO team
Tuesday, 21. November 2017
We welcome the new member of our team: Divyam Rastogi
He recently graduated at the TU Delft with his master thesis „Deep Reinforcement Learning for Bipedal Robots“. In our lab Divyam will continue his research with focus on machine Learning and In-Hand manipulation.
RBO-EPSILON ranked 5th in the final evaluation for CASP12
Tuesday, 07. November 2017
Our contact prediction server RBO-EPSILON ranked 5th in the final evaluation for CASP12
1st SOMA Summer School at Frauenchiemsee has been a full success
Saturday, 22. July 2017
We are looking back to a very successful first summer school on soft manipulation in a beautiful venue - a Benedictine abbey on the Fraueninsel island on lake Chiemsee. Thanks to all the inquisitive participants, keynote speakers and other contributors!
RBO paper accepted at RSS18
Tuesday, 01. May 2018
Congratulations to Divyam Rastogi and Oliver Brock on their accepted paper.
Two RBO papers accepted at ICRA18
Tuesday, 01. May 2018
Two RBO papers have been accepted for ICRA 18: "Coordination of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Degrees of Freedom in Soft Robotic Grasping" and "Physics-Based Selection of Informative Actions for Interactive Perception". Congratulations Can, Armin, Clemens, Roberto, and Oliver!
PhD Thesis Defense by Raphael Deimel
Friday, 23. June 2017
Congratulations to Raphael Deimel who successfully defended his Doctoral Thesis on Soft Hands for Compliant Grasping. He will continue his research as the team leader of the human robot interaction group at MTI engAge.
RBO live on Twitter
Thursday, 20. April 2017
We are now live on Twitter! We will use this account to communicate with the public, share our news and all interesting research we find.
Follow us now on Twitter: @rbolab
And subscribe to our Youtube channel
RBO Hand 2 at opening of ECDF
Monday, 03. April 2017
A presentation of the RBO Hand 2 has been part of the opening activities of the Einstein Center Digital Future, the new research center associated to the TU. The German regional TV channel RBB was covering the event (RBB Abendschau). Take a look!
RBO in TV
Monday, 20. February 2017
We had a TV team at TUB that recorded a 5 minutes report on the idea, manufacturing and testing of the RBO Hand2. Involved was Raphael Deimel and the TV spot will be aired on 28.02 at 7:50pm on MDR in the series "MDR Einfach Genial"
RBO's SoMa project raises the attention of the international media
Wednesday, 01. February 2017
Our project SoMa (Soft Manipulation), funded by the European Union, has been the main topic of several technical reports in the international media. In the project, our soft hand and our techniques to exploit the environment to ease manipulation (environmental constraint exploitation) is applied to solve the needs of our industrial partners Ocado (a British internet supermarked) and Disney. Click on the links to read the reports:
Soma in Ocado's internal report, Soma in Wired, Soma in BCC, Soma in The Guardian, Soma in The Huffington Post, Soma in Techcrunch, Soma in ZDnet, Soma in Silicon, Soma in TheMemo
RBO's paper about the soft hand is one of the most read at IJRR!
Wednesday, 18. January 2017
Our paper "A novel type of compliant and underactuated robotic hand for dexterous grasping" is one of the most read papers at IJRR, a very influential journal in robotics. Congratulations Raphael and Oliver! Do not miss the opportunity of reading it!
Two RBO papers accepted at ICRA17
Monday, 16. January 2017
Two RBO papers have been accepted for the next ICRA: "Achieving Robustness by Optimizing Failure Behavior" and "A Method for Sensorizing Soft Actuators and Its Application to the RBO Hand 2". Congratulations Manuel, Vincent, Gabriel (and Oliver :) )!
Published Code and Data for Online Interactive Perception (OMIP)
Thursday, 24. November 2016
We have published the code of our perceptual system for Online Interactive Perception. The repository contains code to perceive kinematic structures of articulated objects from interactions, based on the data from an RGB-D sensor. More info at:
and
Or directly to the repository at:
RBO paper finalist of the "Best Paper Award" at IROS16!
Thursday, 13. October 2016
Our paper "Probabilistic Multi-Class Segmentation for the Amazon Picking Challenge", which describes the object recognition method we used to win the Amazon Picking Challenge 2015, was among the finalists of the "Best Paper Award" at IROS16 (see video). Cool! The winner this year was "ANYmal - a Highly Mobile and Dynamic Quadrupedal Robot" by Hutter et al. Congratulations!
Four RBO papers at IROS16
Monday, 26. September 2016
Four RBO papers are going to be presented at IROS16: "A Compact Representation of Human Single-Object Grasping", "Coupled Learning of Action Parameters and Forward Models for Manipulation", "Mass Control of Pneumatic Soft Continuum Actuators with Commodity Components" and "Probabilistic Multi-Class Segmentation for the Amazon Picking Challenge". Congratulations to the authors!
Published Code and Data for "Learning State Representations with Robotic Priors"
Thursday, 14. July 2016
We have boiled down our code for learning state representations with robotic priors into a tiny python script and published it at github:
github.com/tu-rbo/learning-state-representations-with-robotic-priors
Five RBO papers accepted at IROS16
Monday, 04. July 2016
Our five papers "Probabilistic Multi-Class Segmentation for the Amazon Picking Challenge", "Coupled Learning of Action Parameters and Forward Models for Manipulation", "A Compact Representation of Human Single-Object Grasping", "Learning Dexterous Manipulation for a Soft Robotic Hand from Human Demonstration" and "Mass Control of Pneumatic Soft Continuum Actuators with Commodity Components" were accepted at IROS16! Congratulations to all the authors!
RBO wins the "Best Systems Paper Award" at RSS16!
Wednesday, 22. June 2016
Our paper Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Building Robotic Systems won the "Best Systems Paper Award" at RSS16! The paper presents our winning entry for the APC and a novel way to compare and characterize robotics systems. The award this year was shared between our paper and An End-To-End System for Accomplishing Tasks with Modular Robots by Gangyuan Jing, Tarik Tosun, Mark Yim and Hadas Kress-Gazit. Congratulations to all the winners!
Release of the Alexander von Humboldt brochure
Thursday, 02. June 2016
We created a brochure about our recently ended Alexander von Humboldt funding period. It summarizes the research projects that were possible thanks to the AvH Foundation. Take a look here!
Our paper was accepted at RSS16
Wednesday, 04. May 2016
The RBO paper Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Robotic Systems Building has been accepted at the next Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS). Congratulations Clemens, Sebastian, Rico, Roberto, Arne, Vincent and Oliver!
RSS16 Workshop on "Robot-Environment Interaction for Perception and Manipulation: Interactive Perception Meets Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control"
Wednesday, 06. April 2016
We are organizing a very exciting workshop on interactive perception at RSS16, Robot-Environment Interaction for Perception and Manipulation: Interactive Perception Meets Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control. Our goal is to compare how interactive perception, optimal control and reinforcement learning address tasks that require to exploit interaction with the environment to jointly solve perception and manipulation.
The RBO Hand 2 at SPIE Photonics West 2016
Friday, 19. February 2016
As part of a new collaboration between RBO and FiberLab, the start-up from Fraunhofer HHI presented their fiber-optic curvature sensor at this years SPIE Photonics West by using their sensor to track the shape of the RBO Hand 2. We are excited to have the RBO hand featured at the conference and wish our friends at FiberLab a successful participation.
ICRA'16 Workshop on "Nature vs. Nurture in Robotics"
Monday, 08. February 2016
We are very excited to organize a workshop on "Nature vs. Nurture in Robotics" at ICRA 2016. The goal of this workshop will be to discuss how to best combine nature (i.e. engineering) and nurture (i.e. machine learning) to make progress toward intelligent robots.
Our paper was accepted at ICRA16
Friday, 15. January 2016
The RBO paper An Integrated Approach to Visual Perception of Articulated Objects will be presented at the upcoming ICRA16. Congratulations Roberto and Sebastian!
Former RBO member publishes paper in Nature!
Thursday, 17. December 2015
T.J. Brunette, a computation biology researcher at The Baker Laboratory that receive his PhD degree under supervision of Oliver Brock at RBO (UMass), publishes a paper in Nature! His work opens the door to design proteins with a desired structure (closely related to their function) using known repeat proteins. Congratulations, T.J.!
Ingmar Posner, research guest at RBO
Wednesday, 02. December 2015
We are very glad to welcome Ingmar Posner from the Mobile Robotics Group at University of Oxford to RBO! He will spend the next months with us, learning and exchanging experiences about manipulation. We are looking forward to the interesting interactions!
Patrick van der Smagt visits RBO
Tuesday, 03. November 2015
Patrick van der Smagt visited our lab and gave us a version of his keynote talk at IROS15 about Variational Deep Neural Networks (networks that output a probability distribution). Really interesting!
RBO participates in the 32th BVL Logistik Kongress
Thursday, 29. October 2015
We were invited to show our winner system of the Amazon Picking Challenge at the 32th BVL Logistik Kongress. Our system raised awareness of the future applications of mobile manipulators in the logistic sector.
RBO hosts a SoMa meeting
Monday, 19. October 2015
We hosted a meeting of the SoMa (Soft Manipulation) European Project. We thank our partners of Uni Pisa and DLR for the fruitful discussions. Next meeting in EuroDisney!
Dario Floreano visits RBO
Wednesday, 21. October 2015
Dario Floreano visited our lab on October 14th to present his work on flying robots. He also joined the SoMa meeting to share knowledge on how to make us of contact with the environment instead of avoiding it, an insight that they also exploit in their research
Nick Farrrow and Nikolaus Correll visit RBO
Monday, 01. June 2015
Nick Farrow and Nikolaus Correll from University of Boulder have developed strain sensors which are compatible with PneuFlex actuators. They will stay with us one month to find interesting collaboration projects. We are looking forward to it!
During their stay they work on integrating both technologies to provide a versatile sensor-actuator compound for soft robotic devices such as the soft hands.
Ron Alterovitz and Chris Bowen visit RBO
Monday, 01. June 2015
Ron Alterovitz and Chris Bowen from the Computational Robotics Group at the University of North Carolina are visiting us. They will stay one month collaborating with RBO.
They are working on demonstration-guided motion planning. Especially they want to find out how to generalize grasp motions learned from human demonstrations.
New members of the RBO team
Monday, 01. June 2015
We welcome the two new members of our team, Jessica and Manuel!
Jessica's research will focus on grasping strategies with soft-hands as part of the SoMa European project. Manuel will be actively involved in the Exploration Challenge, our joint project with University Stuttgart to provide robots with capabilities to explore, understand and exploit kinematic mechanisms in unstructured environments.
RBO Team wins the Amazon Picking Challenge!
Friday, 29. May 2015
Our Team of the Robotics and Biology Laboratory (RBO) at the Technische Universität Berlin won a highly ranked international robotic challenge yesterday. The "Amazon Picking Challenge", which was organized for the first time this year, is awarded with US$20.000 and 25 teams from Europe, USA and Asia competed for it. The goal of the challenge was to develop a robotic system that autonomously grasps several objects from a shelf. The scenario recreates the process that occurs in an Amazon warehouse when a client buys one or more products. Currently these tasks are supported by robotic shelves which move around autonomously within Amazon's warehouse.
With a total of 148 points our team RBO was able to secure the lead. The second place went to the team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with 88 points. Third place was awarded to Team Grizzly of the company Dataspeed, Inc. with 35 points. Among the other participants were top universities like UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech, as well as many robotic companies.
The robot we used for the competition will be shown during this year's Long Night of Sciences on June 13th.
Check out our winning run:
https://youtu.be/UrpMfdj-Mpc (real time)
https://youtu.be/DuFtwpxQnFI (sped up 4x)
Great performance of RBO Aleph in CAMEO
Our automated protein structure prediction server RBO Aleph participates in the Continuous Automated Model Evaluation CAMEO. RBO Aleph consistently performed as one of the top servers overall. It performed especially well for hard targets were it is ranked third.
Congratulations to our Computational Biology team!
RBO is getting ready for the Amazon Picking Challenge
Monday, 25. May 2015
Final preparations in Seattle for the Amazon Picking Challenge! Please keep your fingers crossed for us! Our trial will be on Wednesday, 12:40 p.m. local time (9:40 p.m. German time)!
Computational Biology paper accepted in Nucleic Acids Research
Our paper about RBO Aleph, our newest protein structure prediction web server, has been accepted in the web server issue of Nucleic Acids Research. RBO Aleph had emerged as one of the leading ab initio approaches in the last CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction). Congratulations to our computational biology team!
Link to the paper:
RBO Aleph: leveraging novel information sources for protein structure prediction
Link to the protein structure prediction web server:
http://compbio.robotics.tu-berlin.de/rbo_aleph/
Sporty-Spices!
Friday, 09. January 2015
Our sports team Psycho-Robot-Proteins won the third place in the Instituts-Cup of TU Berlin. Congratulations to Fabian, Guillermo, Janika, Marianne, Michael, and Rico!
Alex Kacelnik visits RBO
Monday, 15. December 2014
On January 7, we are in for a treat. Therefore holds Oliver his hand in the fire. Alex Kacelnik will come by the lab and give a talk at 10. We are looking forward to it! Title of the talk: Spooky problem solving and decision making in birds.
Amazing performance of our CompBio group at CASP11
Wednesday, 03. December 2014
Our RBO_Aleph server was ranked as the No 3 server in Free Modelling and our contact prediction was ranked No 1 for long+medium range contacts in the automatic evaluation for CASP 11. These are amazing results for our computational biology team! Congratulations!
RBO is invited to give a talk at CASP11 conference
Monday, 24. November 2014
We have been invited to give a talk at the CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) conference on the performance of our RBO_Aleph server, which performed among the top groups in the CASP11 experiment in the free modeling category. These amazing results are fruits of the team efforts of our computational biologists. Congratulations Michael, Ines, Tim and Mahmoud!
Oliver Kroemer visits RBO
Tuesday, 04. November 2014
Oliver Kroemer from Jan Peters group will come by on November 26 to present his thesis work during the RBO meeting (10 am). Mark your calendars!
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova visits RBO
Thursday, 23. October 2014
On November 5 during the RBO meeting (10:00) Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova will give a presentation about "Human-Robot cooperation in disaster-response scenarios". Ivana coordinates two European projects: NIFTi and TRADR and her research interests cover different aspects of computational linguistics.
RBO paper on Computational Biology accepted in PLOS ONE
Monday, 04. August 2014
Michael's paper "Combining Physicochemical and Evolutionary Information for Protein Contact Prediction" got published in PLOS ONE. Congratulations!
Raphael Deimel wins Best Student Paper award at RSS 2014!
Thursday, 17. July 2014
Raphael's paper "A New Type of Compliant, Underactuated Robotic Hand for Dexterous Grasping" wins the Best Student Paper award at RSS! Congratulations!
Toby Walsh visits RBO
Wednesday, 09. July 2014
Another great talk is coming our way! Toby Walsh is one of the main players in AI. Please mark your calendars, July 23, 10 am, MAR 5.006!
Jeannette Bohg visits RBO
Monday, 23. June 2014
Jeannette Bohg will be visiting our lab on Friday (June 27). She will give a talk at 14:30 in MAR 5.006 about her research on perception for grasping. Do not miss it!
Jonas Buchli visits RBO
Monday, 16. June 2014
We are happy to announce that Prof. Jonas Buchli will visit our lab next Friday (June 20). He will give a talk about ML for walking and agile robots at 10 am in MAR 5.006. It promises to be interesting!
Dieter Fox visits RBO
Thursday, 01. May 2014
Great news! Prof. Dieter Fox will be visiting our lab next Friday (May 16). He will give a talk about RGB-D sensors in robotics perception at 10 am in MAR 5.006. We are looking forward to it!
Four papers accepted at IROS14
Monday, 19. May 2014
Three RBO papers and one MLR-Stuttgart paper in collaboration with RBO were accepted at the next IROS14. Congratulations Malte+Sebastian, Stefan (MLR)+Johannes (MLR), and Roberto!
Two RBO papers accepted at RSS14
Monday, 12. May 2014
Two RBO papers will be presented at the upcoming RSS14. Congratulations Raphael and Rico!
Presentation at ICRA14 Workshop on Visual Search
Wednesday, 12. February 2014
Sebastian will present our IROS2014 paper "Prior-Assisted Propagation of Spatial Information for Object Search" at the ICRA workshop "Robots in Homes and Industry: Where to look first".
Two RBO papers accepted at ICRA14
Wednesday, 15. January 2014
Two RBO papers will be presented at ICRA14: "Sensor-Based, Task-Constrained Motion Generation Under Uncertainty" and "Extracting Kinematic Background Knowledge from Interactions Using Task-Sensitive Relational Learning". Congratulations Arne+Nico, and Sebastian+Tobias!
And we learned one lesson: check the version of the document you submit. And if you already checked it, check it again! :)
ISRR2013 Invited Submission Confirmation
Tuesday, 03. December 2013
Oliver will present our paper "Exploitation of Environmental Constraints in Human and Robotic Grasping" at the upcoming ISRR in Singapore!
First-MM project finished successfully!
Tuesday, 03. December 2013
After three and a half year of work, the European FP7 project First-MM was finished successfully. RBO's part in the project was researching motion generation methods for mobile manipulators. We also implemented the motion planning algorithms that were used in the final presentation last week. In the final demo a mobile manipulator successfully detected, classified and grasped bottles from shelves only using on-board sensors.
More info and videos here:
http://first-mm.eu/
SCIoI Master Track
Friday, 20. May 2011
Understanding intelligence is one of the great scientific challenges of our time. Yet, in spite of extensive research efforts spanning many scientific disciplines, our understanding of intelligence remains fragmented and incomplete. Science of Intelligence (SCIoI) is a transdisciplinary research approach. Researchers from FU, HU, and TU Berlin work together in order to obtain a better understanding of intelligence. Their cooperation in the central fields of thinking, learning, and perception offers an interdisciplinary environment to students. The SCIoI Master Track is transmitting basic knowledge about potential future-oriented technologies very much appreciated both by industry and academia.
New job opening topic: motion generation for mobile manipulation
Robotics and Computational Biology.
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