League Talks

In order to explain the goal, the challenges and the difficulties of the different RoboCup leagues we invited leading people from the leagues to give talks about these topics. The talks are open to all participants and visitors.There will be talks in English as well in German.

We are glad to announce the following list of speakers.

Soccer Simulation League

Dr. Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, UK

Daniel Polani studied Physics and Mathematics at the University of Mainz, Germany, obtaining his diploma in 1991 and his PhD in 1996. After a research visit to the University of Texas at Austin and a research fellowship at the University of Lübeck, he joined the University of Hertfordshire (UK) in 2002, where he is now Reader in Artificial Life and leader of the SEPIA (Sensor Evolution Processing Informationand Actuation) group. His interests are principled and biologically inspired agent/robot paradigms for learning in complex domains such as RoboCup, including information- and reinforcement learning-based methods.

Small Size League

Tim Laue, DFKI Bremen, Germany

Tim Laue received his diploma in computer science from the Universität Bremen, Germany, in 2004. He is currently with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence at the research group for Safe and Secure Cognitive Systems, Bremen, Germany. His research interests include simulation and state estimation for autonomous robots, e.g. for rehabilitation robots as well as for different kinds of soccer robots.

Middle Size League

Prof. Martin Riedmiller, Universität Osnabrück, Germany

Martin Riedmiller studied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, where he received his diploma in 1992 and his PhD in 1996. In 2002 he became a professor for Computational Intelligence at the University of Dortmund. Since 2003 he is heading the Neuroinformatics Group at the University of Osnabrueck. His research interests are machine learning, neural networks, reinforcement learning and robotics.

Standard Platform League

Dr. Thomas Röfer, DFKI Bremen, Germany

Thomas Röfer received his diploma in computer science and his Dr.ing. degree from Universität Bremen, Germany, in 1993 and 1998, respectively. He is in the Executive Committee of the RoboCup Federation, and he is member of the Transregional Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8 ``Spatial Cognition" at Bremen. He is currently with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence at the research group for Safe and Secure Cognitive Systems, Bremen, Germany. His research interests include rehabilitation robotics, robot soccer, real-time computer vision, world modeling, and humanoid robots.

Humanoid League

Prof. Sven Behnke, Universität Bonn

Sven Behnke received his MS degree in Computer Science (Dipl.-Inform.) in 1997 from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. In 2002, he obtained a PhD in Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat.) from Freie Universität Berlin. He spent the year 2003 as postdoctoral researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA. From 2004 to 2008, Professor Behnke headed the Humanoid Robots Group at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Since April 2008, he is full professor for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Bonn. His research interests include biologically inspired information processing, humanoid robots, computer vision, speech processing, and machine learning.

Rescue Real Robot League

Johannes Pellenz, Universität Koblenz, Germany 

Johannes Pellenz studied Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in Koblenz (Germany) and Athens (GA, USA). He received his MS degree in Computer Science (Dipl.-Inform.) in 1999 from the University of Koblenz-Landau. He spent some years with a major German software company (sd&m AG), and returned to the University of Koblenz-Landau in 2004 to join the Active Vision Group. Since 2007, he is member of the technical committee of the RoboCup Rescue League. His research interests include SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping), rescue robotics, autonomous mobile robots and active sensing.

Rescue Simulation League

Dr. Alexander Kleiner, Universität Freiburg, Germany

Alexander Kleiner is academic adviser (German: "Akademischer Rat") in the Research Group on Foundations of Artificial Intelligence in Freiburg, headed by Prof. Dr. Bernhard Nebel. He received his PhD degree from the University of Freiburg in February 2008. Since 2006, he is member of the executive committee of RoboCup. His research areas are autonomous robot exploration, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and mixed-initiative teams of humans and multi-robot systems.The main concern of his work is on field robotics, e.g. to develop robotic solutions for supporting humans in hostile situations, such as urban search and rescue (USAR).

RoboCup@Home League

Prof. Paul Plöger,  Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, Germany

Paul-Gerhard Plöger studied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Dortmund, UC Berkely and received his PhD from the University of Brandenburg. He held research positions at University of Dortmund and at Fraunhofer IAIS, where he designed and launched an educational robot platform called Volksbot. In 2004 he was appointed as full Professor at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. His current research focuses on control and perception algorithms in robots, robot architectures and the application of new hardware technologies to enhance performance of robots. At Fraunhofer IAIS he is currently involved in the DESIRE service robotic project sponsored by the German Federal Ministery of Education and Research (BMBF) and an EU funded European project dealing with robots learning by experimentation (XPERO). Since 1998 he is an active member of the Robocup community.