Rhino: Intelligent Autonomous Systems
Spearheaded and founded by Professor Armin Cremers, the Rhino: Intelligent Autonomous Systems, which is part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bonn, studies the design of intelligent robotic and software agents.
It was established in January, 1994, by Professor Cremers, together with Professors Joachim Buhmann and Sebastian Thrun, and was named then as the RHINO-Project.
The group aims to make the next generation of intelligent robotic and software agents better, especially in the three aspects. First, it aims to make a robot capable of successfully carrying out multiple, diverse, and possibly interfering tasks in changing and unknown surroundings. Secondly, they plan to improve the performance of such robots by autonomously adapting their control software for the type of tasks they are commanded to perform, and the environments that they are tasked to operate to. Lastly, they envision that robots can robustly perceive a substantially bigger part of their surroundings.
The group believes that these three objectives can be achieved by making robots capable of planning their intended course of action based on anticipation, and making them capable of autonomously learning better control patterns based on their experience.
To make this possible, the Rhino: Intelligent Autonomous Systems intensively performs researches on the following fields, Autonomous Robotics Agents, Autonomous Robot Learning, Indoor Surveillance with Mobile Robots, Object Tracking with Mobile Robots, and the Robot Action Planning.
Among the robots that the group has launched to date are the RHINO and Minerva robots. Both were installed as tour guides, one in the Deutsches Museum Bonn, Germany and the other in the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
The group’s goal with these robots is to make them closer to people, and to make a point that with the progress in the field of robotics and in artificial intelligence, robots can operate reliably even in crowded areas.
