Daniel Leidner wins prestigious ERC Starting Grant
For his innovative space robotics project RECOVER.ME, the researcher received scientific funding from the European Commission. The project is set to begin on May 1, 2024 and will be funded for five years. It aims to equip space exploration robots with the ability to autonomously handle hardware malfunctions. This addresses a significant issue in current space missions, where hardware problems often require manual intervention and can lead to mission failure.
At the heart of RECOVER.ME is the concept of giving robots metacognitive abilities, similar to human problem-solving skills, enabling them to independently recover from severe hardware issues. This approach is critical for future missions, especially those involving complex robots in crewed exploration, where a malfunction could pose risks to other equipment and personnel. The project departs from traditional methods that use pre-programmed responses to specific hardware issues. Instead, it focuses on integrating failure handling into the robot's own cognitive architecture. This involves developing a new kind of knowledge representation system to help robots understand how different hardware faults might impact their functioning and a metacognitive planning process for self-reprogramming. A key feature of RECOVER.ME is enabling robots to monitor and adjust their programming in response to various hardware faults. By converting complex fault information into a format that robots can process and understand, the project aims to provide them with flexible and effective problem-solving strategies.
RECOVER.ME combines elements from robotics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Its success could significantly improve the resilience and efficiency of space exploration robots, reducing the need for external intervention in case of hardware failures.
This is the third time that the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics has won one of the prestigious ERC grants. For his walking robotics project M-Runners (Modal Nonlinear Resonance for Efficient and Versatile Legged Locomotion), Institute Director Prof. Alin Albu-Schäffer was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant on March 28, 2019. Christian Ott received an ERC Consolidator Grant for his walking robotics project proposal NatDyReL (Utilizing Natural Dynamics for Reliable Legged Locomotion) on 29 November 2018.
A total of 400 projects will be funded in the ERC Starting Grant call 2023 with a budget of 628 million euros. The success rate of applicants is 14.8%. A total of 87 ERC Starting Grants will be awarded to German institutions. The target group of the Starting Grant are promising young researchers (2 - 7 years after their doctorate) at the beginning of their independent career.
Daniel Leidner has been working at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics since 2011. He initially led the Rollin' Justin team from 2016 and took over responsibility for the Semantic Planning group in 2017. Since 2020, he has been responsible for the Fault-Tolerant Autonomy Architectures group, to which the ERC grant is now linked. Since October 2023, he has been advising the German government on the elaboration of a strategy for AI-based robots.