Prof. Mandayam Srinivasan is the founder and director of the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, informally known as the MIT Touch Lab that has contributed fundamentally to the emergence and growth of the modern field of haptics.  He is also a Senior Scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT and is recognized worldwide as an authority on haptic computation, cognition, and communication in humans and machines. As a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow, Dr. Srinivasan investigates the scientific foundations of human haptics and their applications in the development of cognitive technical systems such as next generation computer interfaces and robotic assistants, primarily in collaboration with Prof. Martin Buss and colleagues in the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at TUM. Dr. Srinivasan is also building multidisciplinary connections with other research groups within and beyond TUM interested in different aspects of haptics in fields such as neuroscience, psychophysics, micro-technology, robotics and computer science.

Dr. Alexandra Kirsch is a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow. Her research aims at planning and plan execution mechanisms for autonomous robots that assist people in everyday environments. In the context of her IAS fellowship, she will focus on the concept of "expectations" in the execution of everyday activities. Humans constantly make predictions of the world and use this knowledge to decide on a course of actions or detect problems in their activities. In psychology, this capability is believed to be an important factor for the interaction of humans to achieve joint goals. Likewise a robot having expectations about the future development of its environment (including its own actions and the activities of a collaborating human) will be better able to show behavior that feels natural to users. Moreover, comparing expectations with the observed course of actions allows a robot to detect unusual situations without the need to foresee all possible contingencies when programming the robot. Particular challenges in this research are to find appropriate forms of representating relevant knowledge and how to acquire this knowledge automatically.

Dr. Georg von Wichert is a Rudolf Diesel Industry Fellow. At Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies he is responsible for the Cognitive Autonomous Systems Program. When implementing technical systems targeted at autonomous operation in real-world applications, the environmental complexity, leading to extremely high-dimensional state spaces and the unavoidable uncertainty are the main challenges. The uncertainty related issues have to be addressed by actively controlling the systems current understanding of the world. Handling the complexity of real-world applications requires the ability to reason about the world on different levels of abstraction.
Dr. Georg von Wicherts research consequently aims at the realization of “active thinking” as the process of purposefully acquiring information, forming abstracted representations, and using the thus available knowledge to generate robust, goal-directed behavior even in the presence of significant uncertainty. In the context of his IAS fellowship he will cooperate especially with Prof. Martin Buss and colleagues in the TUM Institute of Automatic Control Engineering and focus on devising and demonstrating general architectural principles for cognitive control in autonomous systems based on probabilistic approaches and with applications in (among others) supervisory control and service robotics.

Dr. Dirk Wollherr is currently a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the TUM Institute of Automatic Control Engineering and as a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow active in this TUM-IAS Focus Group.

Dr. Kolja Kühnlenz is currently a Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Scientist at the TUM Institute of Automatic Control Engineering and as a Carl von Linde Junior Fellow active in this TUM-IAS Focus Group.

Doctoral Candidates:
Barbara Gonsior, Automatic Control Engineering
Michael Karg, Intelligent Autonomous Systems
Christina Lichtenthäler, Intelligent Autonomous Systems
Andreas Schmid, Automatic Control Engineering
Bernhard Weber, Automatic Control Engineering
Liu Ziyuan, Automatic Control Engineering