Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz

About us

Founded in 1988, today DFKI is one of the largest nonprofit contract research institutes in the field of innovative software technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) methods. DFKI focuses on the complete cycle of innovation – from world-class basic research and technology development through leading-edge demonstrators and prototypes to product functions and commercialization.  Located in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, and Bremen, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence ranks among the "Centers of Excellence" worldwide.  An important element of DFKI's mission is to move innovations as quickly as possible from the lab into the marketplace. Only by maintaining research projects at the forefront of science, can DFKI have the ability to meet its technology transfer goals. DFKI's safe and secure cognitive systems lab in Bremen has its major focus on behavior based robotics and real-time computer vision.

What motivates us

For DFKI, the experiment GRASPY within the ECHORD project is a great opportunity to bring together two of our most successful research foci, namely object recognition through stereovision and controlling humanoid robots. In the past two year’s, DFKI’s humanoid robot soccer team was world champion twice in the RoboCup Standard Platform League. In GRASPY, we focus on an aspect of humanoid robots that has been rather neglected in robot soccer: grasping. It is nevertheless strongly related to our expertise in humanoid motion planning and active balancing. In previous projects, we developed a vision system that can track multiple balls thrown by a human in real-time, which enables a robot with two arms to catch them. In GRASPY, this approach is extended to recognize graspable objects that are offered by a human, so that the robot can grasp them.