The Institute of Applied Informatics (IAI) is one of six institutes of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bonn. The IAI has more than forty full-time researchers mainly funded by national and European agencies. Its research areas include but are not limited to information systems, Internet technology, information base systems, software technology, computer vision, computer graphics and robotics.
The robotics group of the IAI participates in different European networks such as the VIRGO TMR Network on vision-based robot navigation and PLANET, a coordinating organisation for European research and development in the field of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. It furthermore cooperates with various leading research groups in the world. Among them are the Carnegie Mellon University, University of Toronto and Yale University.
The research objectives of the robotics group lie in the development of autonomous mobile systems, which are able to operate autonomously over long periods of time in populated environments. Typical problems addressed in this group range from sensor interpretation, reactive behaviors, state estimation, environment modeling, path and action planning to human robot interaction.
The research group has published as series of papers about various aspects of mobile robot navigation in outstanding journals of the field. Among them are AI Journal, Journal of Machine Learning, Journal on Robotics and Automation, Journal of AI Research and Journal of Intelligent Robots. In addition to that, several papers have been accepted at highly selective conferences such as the International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence, the North American Confrence of Artificial Intelligence, the International Conference of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. It also published several papers at the International Conference of Robotics and Automation and the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
The group's work is well accepted by the academic community. Four papers were selected for Outstanding Paper Awards at different selective Conference: North American Conference of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '98), Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI '98) (Springer Price), International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '98) and International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents '99).
The navigation system developed by this group was successfully demonstrated in several exhibitions and competitions. During the AAAI-94 mobile robot competition the mobile robot Rhino of the IAI mobile robot research group was the first entry from outside the United States and won the second place award in the competition ``Clean-upthe office''. Further successful demonstrations of the system have been carried out in 1997 and 1998 with the robots Rhino and Minerva which showed their capabilities in the populated environments of the Deutsches Museum Bonn as well as in the National Museum of American History in Washington DC, USA.
Key Personnel
Prof. Armin B. Cremers is the Director of the Institute for Applied Informatics (IAI) at the University of Bonn. He is co-founder of KI-NRW, the state initiative of networked AI research and also a founding member of AKI, the national network of AI institutes in Germany. Prof. Armin B. Cremers received his Ph.D. degree and Venia Legendi from the Mathematics and Computer Science Department of the University of Karlsruhe. He has been an Assistant professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1973 to 1976. Since 1990 he has been Professor and Director of the Institute for Informatics at the University of Bonn. His current research fields include intelligent systems, software technology, and information systems.
Michael Beetz received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1996. Since 1996 he has been a research scientist at the Computer Science Department of the University of Bonn. His scientific interests lie in the fields of AI planning and autonomous mobile robots.