SFB EASE - H1

SFB 1320: Everyday Activity Science and Engineering (EASE)

People master everyday tasks with ease. They manipulate objects in their environment and can deal with incomplete information (e.g. instructions) and unfamiliar circumstances (e.g. a new object or tool). The EASE Collaborative Research Center examines how robotic agents can master manipulation tasks at the competence level of humans.

The subproject H1 examines how humans flexibly adapt their sensorimotor behavior to the variety of conditions and contexts being imposed by everyday scenarios. This adaptation extends over several levels, reaching from task conditions, over object and tool properties, to on-the-fly adjustments of sensorimotor parameters. Causal relations are essential for these adaptive properties.

H1: Sensorimotor and Causal Human Activity Models for Cognitive Architectures

The goal of subproject H1 is to identify and model the causal structures and relations that underlie context-sensitive sensorimotor adaptation. To achieve this goal, we will investigate sensorimotor behavior in natural settings where the context determines the planning, adaptation and execution of the task. As a result we will develop suitable Causal Sensory-Motor Models (CSMMs) which are based on causal probabilistic graphs. CSMMs will model the execution of everyday tasks in a household context and will serve as a basis for the planning, execution, and prediction of arm and hand movements, and, on a higher level, action sequences. The structural dependencies and the functional relations incorporated in the CSMMs will facilitate learning and improve generalizability.

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