E-learning course overview
  • Autonomous Robotics: Action, Perception, and Cognition (ST 2025)
    Registration deadline: open-end

    Prof. Dr. Gregor Schöner

    This course will be combine presence and online features ("hybrid"). The lectures and exercises will take place in the classroom, but can also be followed in real time through a Zoom channel. 

    In the exercise sessions, solutions of the corrected exercises will be discussed. The exercise session can also be used to ask general questions. 

    The course uses e-learning features provided through the present webpages. This course is NOT managed through moodle! To take the course, you must registerm, therefore, through this webpage: Go to "e-learning", select this course, and follow the instructions there. You will need an email address of the Ruhr-University or the Technical University Dortmund for registration. If you are an exchange student without such an email address or come from another university within the Ruhr-Alliance, contact us by email as instructed there. When registering, please fill in your degree program (for example, "MSC Angewandte Informatik", not just "Master of Science"). This is important information for us to manage exams and credit points. 

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This course will be combine presence and online features ("hybrid"). The lectures and exercises will take place in the classroom, but can also be followed in real time through a Zoom channel. 

In the exercise sessions, solutions of the corrected exercises will be discussed. The exercise session can also be used to ask general questions. 

The course uses e-learning features provided through the present webpages. This course is NOT managed through moodle! To take the course, you must registerm, therefore, through this webpage: Go to "e-learning", select this course, and follow the instructions there. You will need an email address of the Ruhr-University or the Technical University Dortmund for registration. If you are an exchange student without such an email address or come from another university within the Ruhr-Alliance, contact us by email as instructed there. When registering, please fill in your degree program (for example, "MSC Angewandte Informatik", not just "Master of Science"). This is important information for us to manage exams and credit points. 

Autonomous robotics is an interdisciplinary research field in which embodied systems equipped with their own sensors and with actuators generate behavior that is not completely pre-programmed. Autonomous robotics thus entails perception, movement generation, as well as core elements of cognition such as making decisions, planning, and integrating multiple constraints. The main focus of the course are solutions to autonomous movement generation that are inspired by analogies with how nervous systems generate movement. 

This course touches on various approaches to this interdisciplinary problem. In the first half of the course focusses on movement generation for autonomous vehicles. The main emphasis will dynamical systems methods (attractor dynamics) for that problem, reviewing related approaches as well. The second half of the course will study motion in robot arms, including motion planning, timing, and control. Analogies with  human movement will be exploited to illustrate ideas and problems, including the degree of freedom problem, coordination, and relex control of muscles. 

Lecturers

Details

Course type
Lectures
Credits
6 CP
Term
Summer Term 2025
E-Learning
e-learning course available

Dates

Lecture
Takes place every week on Thursday from 14:15 to 16:00 in room NB 3/57.
First appointment is on 10.04.2025
Last appointment is on 17.07.2025
Exercise
Takes place every week on Thursday from 16:15 to 17:00 in room NB 3/57.
First appointment is on 10.04.2025
Last appointment is on 17.07.2025

Requirements

The emphasis of the course is on learning concepts, practicing interdisciplinary scholarship including reading and writing at a scientific and technical level. Mathematical concepts are used throughout, so understanding these concepts is important. Mathematical skills are not critical to mastering the material, but helpful. The mathematics is mostly from the qualitative theory of dynamical systems, attractors and their instabilities. Short tutorials on some of these concepts will be provided. 

Further reading

Readings will be posted on this web page. Also have a look at the web page of the Dynamic  Field Theory community that is interested in related problems and solutions. There you find more exercises, reading material, slides and lecture videos that have some overlap with the lecture.

Teaching Units

Introduction
Lecture slides Introduction

This lecture defines autonomous robotics as a field, gives examples of research challenges and an overview of the field. The special and narrow focus of the course is clarified
Video Introduction
Exercises Exercise 1: Dynamical systems tutorial
Lecture slides Dynamical systems tutorial

These slides support exercise 1
Attractor dynamics approach to vehicle path planning
Lecture slides Attractor dynamics approach to vehicle path planning
Video Attractor dynamics approach to vehicle path planning
Exercises Exercise 2: Attractor dynamics approach
Document Background reading for exercise 2
Lecture slides Attractor dynamics approach to vehicle path planning: behavior-based variant
Video Attractor dynamics approach to vehicle path planning: behavior-based variant
Exercises Exercise 3 Attractor dynamics for human locomotion

About the INI

The Institut für Neuroinformatik (INI) is a research unit of the Faculty of Computer Science at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Its scientific goal is to understand the fundamental principles through which organisms generate behavior and cognition while linked to their environments through sensory and effector systems. Inspired by our insights into such natural cognitive systems, we seek new solutions to problems of information processing in artificial cognitive systems. We draw from a variety of disciplines that include experimental psychology and neurophysiology as well as machine learning, neural artificial intelligence, computer vision, and robotics.

Contact

Universitätsstr. 150, Building NB, Room 3/32
D-44801 Bochum, Germany

Tel: (+49) 234 32-28967
Fax: (+49) 234 32-14210

sekretariat@ini.rub.de
www.ini.rub.de