On the occasion of International Women’s Day, DLR invited Women in AI to take a look behind the (virtual) lab doors of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics.

The FUTURO Young Investigator Group played a central role and was invited to represent the results of one year of research with a total of five participants, including Sissy Friedrich, Katharina Hagmann, Anne Köpken, Justine Probst and Daniel Leidner.

The topics discussed included the working student results by Justine on a probabilistic model of the environment of a robot, the work by Sissy on contact classification and her upcoming master thesis on telerobotic skill acquisition, Anne’s work on failure recovery strategies using physics-based state estimation, as well as the digital twin approach by Katharina to train surgeons in minimal invasive surgery.

Special thanks go to Lioba Suchenwirth for organizing the event. The format was different from what you would think in these webinar-heavy days. Instead of talks, she decided on gather.town, a platform that lets you control a virtual avatar in a virtual top-down environment. This way, one can freely move around and interact with each other as one gets close to each other.