The network at the University of Freiburg is researching new methods to improve the learning processes of robots - with the aim of enabling humans and robots to work even more closely together in the future. ReScaLe will receive 5 million euros over the next six years, with scientists from six disciplines involved in the project.

The project is headed by Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard, spokesperson of the BrainLinks-BrainTools Center and head of the Autonomous Intelligent Systems working group at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg. "We are delighted that our concept 'Responsable and Scalable Learning for Robots Assisting Humans' has been selected. The funding from the Carl Zeiss Foundation will strengthen our research on AI-based robots and help drive progress towards autonomous and adaptable service robots that can be used in domestic environments," says Burgard.

AI-based robots are intended to support numerous tasks in society, for example by assisting people in everyday life or making production processes more efficient - however, despite rapid progress in research, they are not yet part of everyday life. In order to make them more integrable into everyday life, ReScaLe will work on the remaining technical challenges in the field of machine learning. On the other hand, the project will also consider social, ethical and legal aspects in order to strengthen trust in these systems.

Innovative machine learning methods will enable ReScaLe robots to learn tasks from humans by demonstrating them to them. To enable robots to perform the learning task efficiently, ReScaLe is developing new approaches to minimize the number of demonstrations required. The research project will introduce novel unsupervised and self-supervised deep learning methods that require only a small amount of annotated data. Other innovative methods will also support deep learning in dealing with uncertainties to further improve data efficiency.
ReScaLe will simultaneously pave the way for responsible AI and robotics applications based on human rights and pursue an integrated multi-level approach that takes into account the ethical-legal normative requirements in conjunction with the risks to core rights and interests as well as the user-oriented design requirements. Specially tailored participatory outreach activities will accompany the project to promote acceptance in society and enable bidirectional communication with researchers.

Researchers from the fields of computer science, ethics, human-machine interaction, law, mathematics and robotics are participating in ReScaLe.

The Carl Zeiss Foundation has set itself the goal of creating scope for scientific breakthroughs. It supports basic research as well as application-oriented research and teaching in the STEM disciplines (mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology). The Carl Zeiss Foundation is the oldest private science-promoting foundation in Germany.