The goal of DLRs research is to enable a wholistic perception of robotic systems using the two predominant robot senses vision and tactility. Perception and cognition are elementary components for tele-operated, assistance and autonomous robot systems, due to the fact that they enable reactive behaviour, attention-based control and interpretation of situations. This talk presents an overview of the main research areas such as

- Innovative sensor concepts

- Sensor data processing and analysis in realtime, e.g. stereo reconstruction, object tracking, and 3D-reconstruction

- Optical navigation and localization of mobile, autonomous systems

- 3D environmental modeling using point-, volume-, and surface-based representations and derived functional models

- Data fusion, data classification and learning algorithms

- Object recognition, pose estimation and scene interpretation

Sensor-based applications such as tactile and visual exploration and navigation, photo realism, further augmentation of real scenes as well as derivation of solutions for automation in the industry are presented. The methods for data interpretation and task-oriented scene comprehension are based on the modeling process and allow for efficient exploration for different missions in space, aerospace and terrestrial scenarios.

As a further example for the combined use of vision and tactile sensors, this talk will give an overview of the research on the DLR Crawler - an actively compliant hexapod based on the fingers of the DLR Hand II.