École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland. EPFL is ranked as Europe’s #1 and world’s #15 university in the field of “Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences” in the academic ranking of world universities (ARWU) by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA) at the EPFL was founded on the 1st of January of 2006. The lab focuses on machine learning, cognitive robotics, computational neuroscience and integrated mechatronics design. LASA is funded primarily by research grants from the EPFL, the European Community and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In addition, LASA has strong ties with various spin-off companies of the EPFL in the field of robotics.

Research at LASA aims at developing robust and adaptive control architectures to realize intelligent robots. The research combines engineering, computer science and computational neuroscience methods for the development of learning control system to enable flexible human-robot interactions. The emphasis is given to research on learning of new motor skills, on the interpretation and recognition of gestures, and on the acquisition and interpretation of verbal communication. The lab has a particular interest in humanoid and educative robotics. A third of the team is developing various types of mechatronic systems, some of which for use in educational and therapeutic applications with normal and disabled children.

In Robohow, EPFL will be responsible for WP5 on learning from interacting with a human partner. It will also work on constraint estimation and its use to bootstrap skill learning via Imitation Learning (WP5) and for optimization (WP3). It will further contribute to the estimation of parameters of Human-Robot Physical Interaction (WP5) and on its use in robotic benchmarking (WP7).