Florian Lay

Markus Knauer, Edoardo Fiorini, Maximilian Mühlbauer et al.

Industrial robot applications require increasingly flexible systems that non-expert users can easily adapt for varying tasks and environments. However, different adaptations benefit from different interaction modalities. We present an interactive framework that enables robot skill adaptation through three complementary modalities: kinesthetic touch for precise spatial corrections, natural language for high-level semantic modifications, and a graphical web interface for visualizing geometric relations and trajectories, inspecting and adjusting parameters, and editing via-points by drag-and-drop. The framework integrates five components: energy-based human-intention detection, a tool-based LLM architecture (where the LLM selects and parameterizes predefined functions rather than generating code) for safe natural language adaptation, Kernelized Movement Primitives (KMPs) for motion encoding, probabilistic Virtual Fixtures for guided demonstration recording, and ergodic control for surface finishing. We demonstrate that this tool-based LLM architecture generalizes skill adaptation from KMPs to ergodic control, enabling voice-commanded surface finishing. Validation on a 7-DoF torque-controlled robot at the Automatica 2025 trade fair demonstrates the practical applicability of our approach in industrial settings.

Christoph Schöller, Vincent Aravantinos, Florian Lay et al.

Pedestrian motion prediction is a fundamental task for autonomous robots and vehicles to operate safely. In recent years many complex approaches based on neural networks have been proposed to address this problem. In this work we show that - surprisingly - a simple Constant Velocity Model can outperform even state-of-the-art neural models. This indicates that either neural networks are not able to make use of the additional information they are provided with, or that this information is not as relevant as commonly believed. Therefore, we analyze how neural networks process their input and how it impacts their predictions. Our analysis reveals pitfalls in training neural networks for pedestrian motion prediction and clarifies false assumptions about the problem itself. In particular, neural networks implicitly learn environmental priors that negatively impact their generalization capability, the motion history of pedestrians is irrelevant and interactions are too complex to predict. Our work shows how neural networks for pedestrian motion prediction can be thoroughly evaluated and our results indicate which research directions for neural motion prediction are promising in future.