The OpenBots Lab centers its research on one core theme: embodied AI for real-world robotics
To drive these advancements, the lab leverages key technical AI components, focusing primarily on:
The OpenBots LAB is dedicated to advancing Embodied AI for real-world robotics.
The lab’s mission and vision are to transform automated systems into truly autonomous ones by injecting common sense principles into their perception and planning processes.
The impact of the lab lies in developing robots capable of navigating “open-world” shifts, with a primary research demonstrator focused on autonomous real-world surveillance using legged robots.
Common sense reasoning – This project focuses on developing new knowledge structures and reasoning methods, specifically utilizing evidence theory and abductive reasoning. The goal is to enable robots to draw logical conclusions from incomplete or uncertain observations, allowing them to make “common sense” decisions in newly encountered situations.
Open world multimodal perception – This research line aims to move robot perception beyond pre-defined datasets. It focuses on handling both sensory shifts (changes in how sensors perceive the environment) and semantic shifts (new or unknown objects), allowing robots to generalize their perception and recognize what is happening in unseen or dynamic environments.
Open world task execution – This project integrates model-based and model-free planning to help robots execute complex actions where data or environment models are limited. It advances semi-predictable task-planning by combining symbolic planning with reinforcement learning, enabling robots to perform complex tasks like perimeter surveillance even when they encounter unpredictable events.
Delft University of Technology (TUD) is a leading technical university that provides researchers for the lab’s core pillars of robotics and AI.
University of Amsterdam (UvA) is a prominent research university whose Video & Image Sense Lab contributes expertise in computer vision and machine learning.
The Netherlands Organization of Applied Scientific Research (TNO) is an independent research organization that provides a physical lab environment and validates autonomous security developments in practice.
Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (KMar) the military police force that provides real-world security use cases and test environments for autonomous surveillance robots.
