The "Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics - CoR-Lab"

What are the basic building blocks of cognition and learning? How can we endow robots with some social competence, to make them acceptable as assistents to humans? How can machines communicate smoothly and on semantic levels with humans? Such important yet unsolved key questions have been guiding Bielefeld researchers in the key area of „intelligent systems“ for many years.

In order to face the enormous challenges implied by such question for robotics, the „Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab)“ was founded at the Bielefeld University in July 2007 under main participation of the research groups Neuroinformatics (Prof. H. Ritter, PD Dr. J. Steil) and Applied Computer Science (Prof. G. Sagerer), who are widely known for their work in artifical cognition, computer vision, neural networks, and robot learning.

The new central scientific institute is supported by the ministry of Innovation, Science, Research and Technology, North Rhine-Westphalia and forms a strategic partnership with the industrial partner Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH (HRI-EU), headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil E. Körner. HRI-EU contributes support for PhD students in joint projects as well as two ASIMO robots, which can be used within the CoR-Lab as a research platform.

The aim of CoR-Lab is to establish a center in an important field of high-technology in the region Ostwestfalen-Lippe. It is meant both to support the domestic medium-sized economy and to strengthen Bielefeld University in its main focus area „intelligent systems“.