Technische Universität München (TUM) is ranked the top academic and research institution in Germany consistently in several independent rankings in recent years. It provides an excellent environment (likely the best in Germany) by substantial funding from the Bavarian state government. One of the missions of the University is to boost interdisciplinary research between engineering, medicine, and humanities.

The Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) group at the Department of Informatics employs about 30 PhD students in the areas of perception, interpretation, and analysis of intentional activities and plan-based and action-aware control of robotic agents. It is one of the key research groups in the German cluster of excellence “Cognition for Technical Systems", where it is responsible for one of the demonstrators - the Assistive Kitchen. The IAS group is in close contact and exchanges researchers with leading research groups all over the world (Willow Garage, CMU, Intel Research Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech, CNRS-LAAS, etc.).

Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR) has its strong expertise in scientific fields over: automatic control, robotics, networked- telepresence- and teleoperation- systems, human-robot interaction, control theory, and machine learning. It is a leader of “Cognition for Technical Systems", which is the German cluster of excellence. Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR) has participated in EU project “Touch-Hapsys”, EU project “Robot@CWE”, EU project “Immersence”, EU project “IURO”, EU project “BEAMING”, EU project “VERE”, German National project “SFB453: High-Fidelity Telepresence and Teleaction”, German National project “SFB-TR28: Cognitive Automobiles”, German National project “SPP Control Theory of Digitally Networked Dynamical Systems”, German National project “Cluster of Excellence Cognition for Technical Systems”.

Key Researchers

Michael BEETZ (http://ias.cs.tum.edu/people/beetz) is professor and head of the IAS group at the Department of Informatics, Technische Universität München. Michael Beetz is also vice-coordinator of the German national cluster of excellence CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems). He was a member of the steering committee of the European Network of Excellence in AI Planning (PLANET) and responsible for the area of robot planning. He received his diploma degree in Computer Science in 1987 from the University Kaiserslautern, Germany, and the M.Sc. (1994), M.Phil. (1994), and the Ph.D. (1996) degree from Yale University, New Haven, USA. He got his venia legendi and finished his habilitation dissertation at the University of Bonn in 2001. His primary research interest includes physically embedded intelligent systems, automatic acquisition of action models, and plan-based robot control.

Dongheui LEE (http://www.lsr.ei.tum.de/professors/detail/lee) is currently an assistant professor (since October 2009) at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. She is the head of Dynamic Human Robot Interaction for Automation System Lab. She received her B.S. and M.S degree at the department of mechanical engineering, Kyunghee University, Korea, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. She worked as a research scientist at the Advanced Robotics Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in Korea from 2001 to 2004. In 2007, she received her PhD degree at the department of Mechano-Informatics, the University of Tokyo, Japan. After receiving PhD degree she joined the center of Information and Robot Technology at the University of Tokyo as a project assistant professor. Her research interests include human motion understanding, human robot interaction, machine learning in robotics, and mobile robot navigation.