CoR-Lab, Bielefeld University
Bielefeld University is located in Bielefeld, Germany and was founded in 1969. Armed with an explicit task and mission to offer high-quality research-oriented teaching, Bielefeld University considers itself a reform institution as it follows a completely different style of organization and teaching when compared to other, more established universities.
Stressing interdisciplinary research, the unviersity has managed to gather all of its faculties in one great structure. The university was also the first in Germany to fully switch faculties to Bachelors or Masters degrees, which was a part of the Bologna process.
From a humble beginning, Bielefeld University today has 13 faculties that cover a broad range of disciplines in humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and technology. And with nearly 18,500 students in 80 degree courses and 2,600 staff, Bielefeld Unviersity is considered one of the country’s medium sized universities. Since the day the university was established, it has been guided by the idea that the most current complex problems cannot be dealt with adequately through mono-disclplinary appraches.
The university’s faculties inlcude the Faculty of Biology, Faculty of Chemistry, Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology, Faculty of Public Health, Faculty of Linguistics and Literature, Faculty of Mathematics,Faculty of Educational Science, Faculty of Physics,Faculty of Psychology and Sports,Faculty of Law, Faculty of Sociology, Faculty of Technology, and the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics.
As the university continues to expand, so do the challenges being implied in the world of robotics. In order to meet this challenge, the university established the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics in July of 2007, which is headed by the research group Neuroinformatics. It is the aim of the CoR-Lab to set up a center in the field of technology in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region. It is their desire to support local medium-sized economy and to strengthen the university in its main focus, “Intelligent Systems.”
Among notable robots developed at this laboratory was the anthropomorphic robot head called the “Flobi.” This robot combined state-of-the-art sensing with an exterior that displays sympathetic emotional responses. It could also show primary and secondary emotions in a more human-like way, allowing for intuitive human-robot interaction.
