We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Georgia Chalvatzaki has been awarded the prestigious and highly competitive ERC Starting Grant for her groundbreaking project, SIREN: Structured Interactive Perception and Learning for Holistic Robotic Embodied Intelligence.
The ERC Starting Grant provides approximately €1.5 million over five years, enabling Prof. Chalvatzaki and her team to conduct pioneering research that will push the boundaries of robotic learning and interaction.
See the official announcement by the European Research Council here: ERC 2024 Starting Grants Results
About SIREN
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SIREN proposes a unique systemic view of robot learning with a holistic representation of robot and environment as an integrated system. Robot and environment are NOT separate entities.
We posit that robot and environment are not separate entities. They co-exist under the same constrained world and physical laws while exchanging information.
SIREN aims to uncover this underlying structure and information flow that govern the robot-environment interaction. Our goal is to unveil key properties of the action-perception cycle for developing embodied intelligence. We will, thus, study the intertwined flow of information and energy within the components of our proposed holistic robot-environment system.
We propose a framework that pioneers information-driven and physics-aware objectives. It aims to learn from embodied multisensorial streams a unified representation of the robot-environment system and its dynamics. Within this framework, we will study modular uncertainty estimation to promote robustness.
A key component is to ground high-level semantic information, e.g., from foundation models and affordances, onto robot-environment properties that allow for scaling and generalization of robotic behaviors within highly dynamic and unpredictable human-like environments.Eventually, we will investigate how to train uncertainty-aware, composable skills to adapt to new tasks.
SIREN’s breakthroughs will enable robots, particularly humanoid mobile manipulators, to merge in unstructured, human-like settings and perform challenging tasks that require smooth and efficient perception-action coordination, balancing generalization and robustness in the face of inevitable real-world uncertainties.
Our paradigm shift opens avenues for future groundbreaking research rooted in SIREN’s impacts toward continuous robot learning systems that are integrated and evolve with their environment.
About the PEARL Team
The PEARL lab, led by Prof. Georgia Chalvatzaki, focuses on developing autonomous robotic systems that interact and collaborate with humans in dynamic environments. Our key research areas include embodied AI, lifelong robot learning, and human-robot interaction. We specialize in mobile manipulation, long-horizon task planning, multisensory perception, and uncertainty modeling, enabling robots to adapt to real-world complexities. By bridging model-based and data-driven methods, we aim to empower robots to solve everyday tasks in human environments with robustness, adaptability, and efficiency.
For more details, visit: PEARL Lab.