Prof. Anuradha Annaswamy is the Director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory and a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT where her group members are developing novel control methods for high performance in flight, propulsion, and automotive systems that have to function in uncertain environments. As a "Hans Fischer Senior Fellow" of TUM-IAS, Annaswamy will focus on developing a distributed adaptive control theory for large-scale networked dynamic systems subject to uncertainties. Technology advances, combined with increasingly stringent performance specifications as well as considerations of cost, size, and reliability, are fueling an increasing interest in the analysis and synthesis of networked control systems and are raising fundamentally new questions in control, communications, and information processing. Annaswamy’s goal is to develop the blueprint for such a system as well as its cognitive ability to self-adapt and learn when subjected to different uncertainties. All of her research activities will be carried out in collaboration with the Network Control Systems group in the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at TUM.

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 will investigate 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.