Software Engineering for Cognitive Robots and Systems

The Software Engineering for Cognitive Robots and Systems (SECORO) group at the University of Bremen conducts basic and applied research on robotic agents capable of physically interacting with their environment, collaborating with humans and other agents, and performing a variety of tasks autonomously in open-ended environments. Our overall mission is to make these systems act in a transparent manner that makes sense to humans and other agents and can function reliably over a long period of time. To this end, we are conducting research on novel methods, concepts, and tools to support automated engineering of robotic agents, covering their complete lifecycles in virtual and real environments. We enable humans to specify, construct, validate, and evaluate these systems,  as well as the robots themselves, to autonomously adapt their software to the various and changing runtime requirements induced by the robot’s task or environment. We are evaluating our research jointly with stakeholders from various application domains, including smart factories, healthcare, and logistics.