Robotics, Agent Modelling and Vision Research Groups and Resources

Robotics, Agent Modelling and Vision Research Groups and Resources:

AgentLink : An open European research network providing various resources including links to agent researchers and developers, agent-related events (conferences and workshops), European R&D; projects on agent technology, and a number of special interest groups.

AgentWeb - Intelligent Software Agents : Information and resources related to intelligent information agents, intentional agents, software agents, soft bots, know bots, info bots, etc. Also some pointers to research on agent-oriented robotics. Maintained by Timothy Finin at UMBC.

Amsterdam - Intelligent Autonomous Systems : Research papers, pre-prints, introductory textbook on neural networks and robotics.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Resources : Collection of links to autonomous underwater vehicle-related research, maintained by Maja Matijasevic at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Bern - Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence

Birmingham - Cognition and Affect Directory : Research papers by Aaron Sloman, Louise Pryor, Luc Beaudoin and others.

Bonn - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Group

Bonn - Complex Learning Systems: The Mobile Robot (RHINO)

British Columbia (UBC) - Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI) : Research in computational reasoning, action and perception, and robotics.

British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern Recognition (BMVA)

Brown - Robotics

California-Berkeley (UCB) - Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab : Research, publications, demos and movies, tools and external links.

California-San Diego (UCSD) - Interactive Cognition Lab - Librarian Agent Project : Research on software agents which can help users find resource materials in large libraries.

California-San Diego (UCSD) - Visual Computing Laboratory : Research on interactive and immersive video, content-based and similarity-based retrieval in visual information systems, retinal image databases, neuroscience information systems, robotics, vision and image processing.

Caltech - Robotics : Research and publications on hyper-redundant robotics systems, robotic locomotion, sensor-based motion planning, modular robots, medical robotics, global optimization and analog VLSI, grasping and fixture planning and basic kinematics.

Cambridge - Speech, Vision and Robotics (SVR) Group

Carnegie Mellon - Artificial Intelligence Repository : Software packages for intelligent agent architectures, artificial life and complex adaptive systems, machine learning, planning, robotics, vision, and many others.

Carnegie Mellon (CMU) - Computer Science Research : Research on robotic cognition, robotic locomotion, robotic manipulation, robotic manufacturing and automation, robotic vision, intelligent coordination and logistics, active perception, learning, reinforcement learning, computer vision and image processing, and many other areas.

Case Western Reserve (CWRU) - Autonomous Agents Research Group : Research and publications on evolution of dynamical nervous systems (continuous-time recurrent neural networks) for autonomous agents, dynamics of adaptive behaviour, biologically-inspired robotics and other topics. Randall Beer. 

Central Research and Design Institute for Robotics and Technical Cybernetics, St.Petersburg : Research in robotics (including special and space robotic systems, submarine robots, fire-fighting robots and robot operators for nuclear power stations), photon technics, control and monitoring systems, laser technologies, information systems and computer networks, telematics and LAN manufacturing.

Chicago - Artificial Intelligence Laboratory - Animate Agent Project : Research and publications on intelligent, goal-directed behavior in software and hardware agents, using both reactive control and symbolic planning.

Colorado - Linguistic Geometry : Application of syntactic tools for knowledge representation and reasoning about large-scale hierarchical complex systems to search problems such as autonomous robot navigation planning. Boris Stilman.

Denmark (DIKU) - Computer Vision Research Group : Research and publications on computer vision, robotics and statistics.

Cornell - Robotics and Vision Laboratory : Research in machine vision, navigation and tracking, robotic manipulation, distributed and cooperative robotics, microelectromechanical systems, planning and control, uncertainty and error, and geometric algorithms. Technical and research papers available by FTP.

Delft University of Technology - Control Laboratory : Research in dexterous gripping and manipulation, fine-motion control, force reflection and bilateral control, high-level control of grippers and robots, low-level gripper control, and robot facilities.

Dresden - Artificial Intelligence Institute - Mobile Robotics

Dublin - Electronic Engineering - Autonomous Systems Group - FTP : Research on artificial systems exhibiting autonomous behaviour and organisation comparable to that of biological organisms. Projects with real (LEGO) robots, within the evolutionary robotics paradigm, and cellular automata-based studies of simple biological organisation.

Edinburgh - Machine Vision Unit

Edinburgh - Mobile Robots Group : Research on real-world autonomous agents using non-symbolic-logical tools including behaviour-based architectures, neural nets, genetic algorithms, ethology and control theory.

Engineering Services Inc (ESI) : A Canadian consulting company specialising in custom-made mobile and modular robotic systems for industrial, military and medical applications.

Essex - Robots - FTP

Euro-Robots - Mobile Robots Archive : Links to competitions, conferences, FAQs, simulators, components, commercial and research groups and other information related to mobile robots and intelligent autonomous vehicles.

European Computer Vision Network (ECVNet)

FISC (Financement Insertion en Sciences Cognitives) Mailing List - English or French : International mailing list devoted to jobs, post-docs and grants in cognitive science, interpreted broadly to include all disciplines covered by this resource guide. Highly recommended.

Free University of Brussels (VUB) - Artificial Intelligence Laboratory : Luc Steels.

French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) - Robotics, Image and Vision

Geneva University Hospital (UIN-CIH) - Distributed Artificial Intelligence : Research and publications on multi-agent systems, their application to problem solving in a biomedical field, the design of agent-oriented languages, and multi-agent vision systems. Olivier Baujard.

Georgia Tech - Learning and Adaptation in Autonomous Intelligent Agents Research

Georgia Tech - Mobile Robotics Laboratory : Research and publications on multi-agent robotic systems, reactive control, ecological robotics, low-level nuclear waste inspection, unmanned aerial vehicles, mobile manipulation, integrated planning and learning, and learning and adaptation in autonomous robotic systems. Directed by Ronald Arkin.

German National Research Centre for Information Technology (GMD) - Autonomous Systems : Research on adaptive systems (evolutionary algorithms, statistical learning and exploration procedures, adaptive robotics, open systems), cognitive robotics (behavioural principles for autonomy, robustness, adaptivity, self-organization) and other areas. Projects on distributed real time control, object orientation, dynamic scheduling, reflective adaptive multi-agent control systems, operation in open environments, anthropomorphic two-armed robots, sewerage robots, autonomous vehicles, mapping, localization, reactive and goal oriented navigation, vision-based navigation and other topics.

Germany - Robotics in Germany : An extensive and detailed list of institutes, groups, and people doing robotics research in Germany. Maintained by Uwe R. Zimmer.

GMD - Japan Research Laboratory : Research and publications on autonomous robust robots.

Graduate Students Who's Who in Robotics

Harvard - Robotics Lab:

Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) - Automation Laboratory : Research and publications on automation technology including mobile robotics, interactive robotics, mechatronics and control of industrial processes.

Illinois - Artificial Intelligence Group : Computer and robot vision, navigational schemes, knowledge representation, automated decision systems, deductive and inductive reasoning methods, analysis and generation of natural language, cognitive modelling and simulation, robotic motion, task planning, and plan execution/error recovery schemes.

Indiana - Robotics Lab

Intelligent Software Agents : Repository of information about people, papers and other WWW pages relating to intelligent software agents. Includes facilities to add yourself and/or your own papers. Maintained by Ralph Becket at Cambridge.

Intelligent Software Agents : Resource guide to information integration agents, coordinated agents, mobile agents, assistant agents, believable agents, recommended reading and other resources. Maintained by Sverker Janson at SICS.

Interface Agents : Bibliography and resources on autonomous agents in HCI and CSCW. Maintained by Andy Wood at Birmingham.

International Society for Adaptive Behavior (ISAB) : A scientific society devoted to education and furthering research on adaptive behaviour in animals, animats, software agents and robots. Links to relevant journals, conferences, jobs, research groups etc.

Iowa - Artificial Intelligence Research Group : Vasant Honavar and others, principally on symbolic/connectionist systems. Research papers available online.

Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale (IDSIA), Lugano: Research on AI tools, robotics (execution, planning and learning of sensor-based activities), knowledge discovery, artificial life, linguistics and second language learning, reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation, neural networks and other areas.

Japan - Robotics in Japan : An extensive list of institutes, groups, and people concerned with robotics and related topics (including artificial life, neural networks, vision and cognition) in Japan. Maintained by Uwe Zimmer at GMD.

Kaiserslautern - Autonomous Mobile Robots Research Group : Research and publications on self-localization, exploration, navigation, world modelling, neural networks, subsymbolic and geometric abstractions, object recognition, realtime communication and operating systems, operation in hazardous environments and other topics.

Kawato Dynamic Brain Project - Humanoid Robot:

Kent at Canterbury - Electronic Engineering - Mobile Robots Research Group

Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (LAAS/CNRS) - Robotics and AI Group (LAAS/RIA) - Seminars

Lausanne, 

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) - Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) : Research on mobile robotics (service robots, personal robots), micro robotics and ultra precision micro machines. Offers the ASL Forum, a platform for discussions on mobile robotics and related subjects.

Lausanne, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) - Institute of Robotics Systems : Research and publications on surgical robotics, ergonomics of intelligent systems and design, micromechatronics, high precision robotics, parallel robots, robot controllers, vision, autonomous systems and other topics.

Lausanne, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) - Laboratoire de Microinformatique (LAMI) : Research on neuro-mimetic systems, robot learning, collective robotics, mobile robots, biovision and robotics, computer vision, miniature robots and subsystems, and other robotics related activities.

LEGO Robots:

Leibniz Laboratory - Systèmes Cognitifs / Cognitive Systems : Cognitive systems - investigation, modelling and implementation of cognitive abilities such as knowledge representation, reasoning, perception, action, learning and language - and interdisciplinary research on neural networks, probabilistic models and genetic algorithms in robotics and AI, multi-agent systems and other areas.

LIFIA - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale et d'Intelligence Artificielle : at the Informatique et Mathematique Appliquee de Grenoble (IMAG) Institute. Research in logics and automated deduction, knowledge bases, multi-agent paradigm for AI, neural nets, computer vision, robot programming, and mobile robotics.

Linkvping Institute of Technology - Robotics / Autonomous Mechanical Systems

London-Queen Mary and Westfield College (QMW) - Distributed Artificial Intelligence 

Unit : Research and publications on distributed AI, intelligent autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Includes hypertext document "Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice", a list of agent-related pages and a list of agent-related bibliographic databases. Michael Wooldridge and Nick Jennings.

London-University College (UCL) - Neural Computation and Robotics Group : Research and publications on modelling neuronal function, multi-unit recording, robotics and virtual reality.

London and South East Centre for High Performance Computing (SEL-HPC) - Vision and 

Image Processing Archive : Articles on low level image processing and tracking, intermediate level vision (model matching), high level vision (image understanding), vision with parallel processing, and other subjects. Also, links to home pages of researchers in vision. Users can add their own articles, and a link to their own home page.

Lulea University of Technology - Robotics and Automation : Research on mobile robot navigation, tele-operation and semi-autonomous robots, range camera applications and tele-instruction.

Lund - Cognitive Science (LUCS) - Research Projects : Research on robots with autonomous spatial learning, neural vision, adaptation, learning and motivation in artificial creatures, and other topics.

Manchester - Robotics : Research on new control mechanisms for mobile robots. Current focus on autonomous robot competence acquisition, machine learning through tuition and mobile robot navigation.

Maryland - Autonomous Mobile Robot Laboratory

Massachusetts (UMass) - Center for Autonomous Real-Time Systems

Massachusetts (UMass) - Computer Vision Research Laboratory

Massachusetts (UMass) - Distributed Artificial Intelligence Group : Research in multiple agent interaction, sensor interpretation, sound understanding, real-time scheduling, and resource-constrained scheduling.

Massachusetts (UMass) - Experimental Knowledge Systems Laboratory (EKSL) : Research in autonomous agents operating in complex, real-world environments.

Massachussetts (UMass) - Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics : Research areas include dexterous manipulation (reaching and grasping), mobile robot navigation, geometric reasoning, assembly planning, and the application of learning theory to robotics.

Massachusetts (UMass) - Resource-Bounded Reasoning Research Group : Research on the implications of limited computational resources on the design of intelligent agents, including decision theory, real-time planning, autonomous agent architectures and reasoning under uncertainty.

McGill - Center for Intelligent Machines (CIM) : Research in mobile robotics and shape recognition, and biologically motivated robot vision systems.

McGill - Ophthalmology - Vision Research : Research and publications on a wide range of approaches in vision science, including human psychophysics, animal neurophysiology, computational modelling, functional imaging and clinical applications.

Michigan - ARPA Real Time Planning and Control Program for Unmanned Ground

Vehicles : Research, papers and related external links on the coordination of multiple cooperating vehicles performing a mission, including planning and replanning, plan recognition, communication, and assimilation of environmental information.

Michigan - Distributed Intelligent Agents Group : Research and papers on multiagent planning and coordination as distributed search, multiagent planning and coordination for unmanned ground vehicles, coordination through plan recognition, organizational self design, intelligent agent infrastructures for supporting collaboration, recursive agent modelling, and procedural reasoning systems.

MIT - AI Lab - Robotics and Machine Vision : Research on computer vision, mobile robotics, microrobotics, humanoid robotics, artificial muscles, haptic interfaces, vision and touch guided manipulation, and robot hands.

MIT - The Cog Shop : The Cog humanoid robot project. Rodney Brooks and colleagues.

MIT - Media Laboratory - Research Groups : Research and publications on machine listening, machine understanding, software agents, spatial imaging, vision and modelling and many other topics.

Monash - Intelligent Robotics Research Centre

NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) - Robotics

NASA - Johnson Space Center - Automation and Robotics Division

NASA - Space Telerobotics Program

New South Wales - Artificial Intelligence : Research in cognitive science, control applications, knowledge acquisition, machine learning, mufti-agent problem solving, natural language understanding, neural networks, qualitative methods, robotics, vision and pattern recognition.

North Carolina-Chapel Hill - Computer Science - Neural Networks and Vision : Research on neural network models of visual perception.

Northwestern - Intelligent Perception and Action Lab : Biologically inspired and knowledge-intensive systems that interact intelligently with the world via a camera and robot hand.

Nottingham - Artificial Intelligence Research Group Research and papers on knowledge-based systems, knowledge acquisition, autonomous agents, intelligent tutoring systems, planning, natural language understanding, cognitive modelling and associated tools, evolutionary simulation, adaptive behavior, and artificial life.

Nottingham - Autonomous Agents

Oxford - Eye-Movement Centre (OEMC)

Oxford - Robotics Research Group

Paris-Ecole Normale Superieure - Groupe de BioInformatique : Research on animates, neural networks, genetic algorithms, image processing and vision, and links to related sites.

Pennsylvania - Computational Vision Research

Pennsylvania - General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory : Ruzena Bajcsy.

Pennsylvania - Vision Research Center

Pilot European Image Processing Archive (PEIPA)

Queen's - Robotics and Perception Laboratory : Research and publications on computational vision, tactile perception and robot control.

Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction : Introductory textbook on reinforcement learning by Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto (1998). The book is published by MIT Press, and a full on-line version is also available. Topics covered include evaluative feedback, the agent-environment interface, goals and rewards, the Markov property, Markov decision processes, optimal value functions, dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, temporal difference learning, eligibility traces, generalization and function approximation, planning and learning.

The 6.270 Robot Builder's Guide : The course notes to the 1992 MIT LEGO Robot Design Competition, by Fred Martin.

Robot Builder's Resources

Robotics Internet Resources : Maintained by Chris Connolly at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Robotics Internet Sources : Maintained by Jason Al meter at Indiana University.

Rochester - Computer Science (URCS) - Robotics : Research on robotic tel manipulation and hand-eye coordination.

Rochester - Computer Science (URCS) - Robotics and Vision Technical Reports : Dana Ballard.

Rochester - Computer Science (URCS) - Vision and Robotics Lab

Rutgers - Vision Research Laboratory : Research on stereoscopic and occlusion perception, apparent motion, texture segregation and modelling, the role of attention in visual tasks, models for spacial and motion perception, human factors, learning processes for perception tasks, sharpness perception in color, and image compression based on human visual performance.

St.Petersburg - Central Research and Design Institute for Robotics and Technical 

Cybernetics : Research in robotics (including special and space robotic systems, submarine robots, fire-fighting robots and robot operators for nuclear power stations), photon technics, control and monitoring systems, laser technologies, information systems and computer networks, telematics and LAN manufacturing.

Salford - Electronic and Electrical Engineering- Mobile Robot Research

Software Agents Mailing List : A software agents mailing list and related materials. Maintained by Ray Johnson at Lockheed.

South Carolina - Electrical and Computer Engineering - Mobile Robotics Laboratory

Southampton - Image, Speech and Intelligent Systems (ISIS) Research Group : Research and publications on computer vision and image processing (feature extraction, 3D imaging, face recognition, texture analysis, image interpretation and analysis) and many other topics. See previous entries.

Southern California (USC) - Robotics Research Laboratory : Research in autonomous robotics, biological and artificial neural systems, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, robotic and prosthetic hands, design for assembly, and fuzzy control. Affiliated with the Center for Neural Engineering, directed by Michael Arbib.

SRI International - Engineering Research : Links to Artificial Intelligence Center (AIC), Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), research groups in virtual perception, machine vision and robotics.

Stanford - Adaptive Intelligent Systems : Research and publications on architectural foundations, selective attention, reasoning processes for diagnosis, prediction, and planning, reactive behavior, real-time control, global coordination of multiple tasks, motivational factors, reasoning by analogy, improvisation under constraints, learning from experience. Barbara Hayes-Roth.

Stanford - Advanced Manipulation Group

Stanford - Artificial Intelligence And Robotics

Stanford - Robotics : Modelling artificial agents and their environments. Emphasis on computational reasons for ascribing mental attitudes to machines, and on the relation between symbolic reasoning and sensory-motor activity. Yoav Shoham.

Stanford - Robotics : Research on manipulation, machine learning, navigation, vision, tactile sensing, and reasoning.

Stanford - Robotics and Planning : Research and reports on mobile robot navigation, path planning, assembly planning, dynamic adaptation of individual perception-action control plans. Jean-Claude Latombe.

Stanford - Vision and Imaging Science and Technology

Stanford Research Institute (SRI) - Flakey Papers

Surrey - Vision, Speech and Signal Processing Group (CVSSP) : Research on computer vision, image analysis, image communication, multimedia systems, speech processing, and signal detection.

Sussex - Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics

Sussex - Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group : One of the world's largest groups of researchers studying artificial evolutionary and adaptive systems (work often described as artificial life, evolutionary computation, and adaptive behaviour research) including Dave Cliff, Inman Harvey and Phil Husbands.

Sussex - POPBUGS : A simulation environment which lets you experiment with simple, simulated robots in a 2D world. Demonstrations include simulations of Braitenberg vehicles. Chris Thornton.

Sussex - Vision

Szeged/Institute of Isotopes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences - Adaptive Systems : Research and publications on self-organized artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, autonomous agents, reinforcement learning, constructive learning, concept learning, biological modelling and analog/mixed VLSI design.

Texas - Qualitative Reasoning Research Group : Research and publications on qualitative reasoning about the physical world, spatial reasoning and intelligent robotics, resource-limited approaches to knowledge representation. Benjamin Kuipers.

Toronto - Cognitive Robotics : Yves Lesperance, Hector Levesque

Toronto - Robotics and Automation Laboratory (RAL)

Troms / Cornell - TACOMA Project : Operating system support for networking software agents, and how agents can be used to solve problems traditionally addressed by operating systems.

Tsukuba - Intelligent Robot Laboratory

Utah - Robotics and Computer Vision

Vanderbilt - Center for Intelligent Systems (CIS) : Research and publications on service robots and human/robot symbiosis.

Vision 1 - Vision and Imaging Technology Resource : Commercial site including product information, extensive list of commercial, academic and government links, technical support and links to vision-related FAQs.

Vision-Based Robot Navigation Research Network (VIRGO) : A network of ten European computer vision and robotics research institutes.

Vision-List Archive

Walking Machines Catalog : Collection of links to walking machine-related research, maintained by Karsten Berns at FZI in Karlsruhe.

Waseda - Humanoid Project : Anthropomorphic robot with sensing, recognition, expression and motion sub-systems. Links to other Japanese robotics sites.

Washington - Bio robotics

West of England (UWE) - Intelligent Autonomous Systems Engineering Laboratory : Research in neural networks, genetic algorithms and machine learning techniques, for intelligent autonomous control systems operating in real-world environments. Applications in manufacturing, mechanical and aeronautical engineering.

Western Australia - Robotics and Automation Laboratory : Research on robotic teleoperation using WWW, robotic sheep shearing, snakes in image processing, robot calibration, robotic manipulation of small plants, low cost techniques for robot prototyping, and other projects.

Wollongong - Intelligent Systems and Software Engineering (Robotics)

Yale - Vision and Robotics Group : Research on motion analysis, neural network-based recognition, geometric reasoning, human and computer object recognition, mobile robotics, sensor-based manipulation, control of highly dynamic nonlinear systems, and planning.

Zurich (UNIZH) - Artificial Intelligence Laboratory : Interdisciplinary research and publications on the study of intelligence in natural and artificial systems, specializing in situated design and autonomous agent design. Neural network-based, biologically inspired robots. Rolf Pfeifer.