The “The Underwater Robotics AI Challenge” is organized by the Robotics Innovation Center (RIC), which belongs to the Bremen location of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Headed by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Frank Kirchner, scientists here develop robotic systems for complex tasks on land, under water, in the air, and in space.
The DFKI is the leading German research center in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence methods. It comprises sites in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen and Lower Saxony, as well as laboratories in Berlin and Darmstadt, and branch offices in Lübeck and Trier.
The DFKI Robotics Innovation Center (RIC) is a young, dynamically growing field of research at the DFKI with international character. Currently, a staff of around 125 employees from all over the world works here in research and development. Up to 52 student assistants support the individual projects. The Robotics Innovation Center closely cooperates with the Robotics Group at the University of Bremen.
The Robotics Innovation Center team benefits from interdisciplinary cooperation: computer scientists and design engineers meet biologists, mathematicians, computer linguists, industrial designers, electro engineers, physicists, and psychologists in order to jointly develop mobile robot systems. The design accords to latest mechatronic developments and programming based on complex, massive-parallel embedded systems solutions.
In the framework of direct industrial orders or publicly funded joint projects, the Robotics Innovation Center designs and realizes intelligent robots for a variety of fields of application, such as space, underwater, electric mobility, logistics, production and consumer (LPC), SAR (Search and Rescue) and security robotics, and assistance- and rehabilitation systems. The focus lies on a rapid transfer of results of basic research into real-world applications.
The DFKI Robotics Innovation Center actively supports the compatibility of family and career. An in-house childcare facility is offered for emergencies where DFKI employees’ children may be looked after by qualified kindergarten teachers in terms of a full-day care service.