Guest Lecture

Humanoid Robotics – Creating General-Purpose Functional Intelligence

Guest Lecture by Prof. Dr. Tamim Asfour, KIT
September 4th, 2025
11:15
IMBIT NEXUS Lab, Georges-Köhler-Allee 201, 79110 Freiburg
Research in humanoid robotics strives to create versatile machines endowed with functional intelligence. These machines should be able to reason and act in the physical world and perform any task that a human might reasonably be expected to carry out. The era of humanoid robots acting in the real world as general-purpose machines with functional intelligence has arrived. Substantial advances have been made, positioning AI-based humanoid robotics as a cornerstone in both robotics research and understanding intelligence. In this talk, I will present progress towards 24/7 humanoid robots that are rapidly becoming accessible to everyone and will empower and assist people. I will specifically focus on engineering holistic systems with architectures that integrate semantic representations and sensorimotor control to allow learning from human and natural interaction, and performing complex manipulation tasks. I will conclude with a discussion of the major challenges of an AI-based robotics and the transformative impact humanoid robotics will have in the future as these systems transition from laboratories to homes and workplaces in the coming years.

BIOGRAPHY: Tamim Asfour is the Spokesperson of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) and Full Professor of Humanoid Robotics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He directs the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T) at the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics. His research focuses on the engineering 24/7 humanoid robot systems that integrates artificial intelligence, informatics, and mechatronics to perform versatile tasks in the real world while learning from humans, experience and interaction with the environment. Tamim is the developer of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. He has been a visiting professor at Georgia Tech, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and the National University of Singapore. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE-RAS Humanoids Conference Editorial Board, and the scientific spokesperson of the KIT Center “Information · Systems · Technologies” (KCIST).

Learn more about Tamim Asfour’s research group at www.humanoids.kit.edu


HOST: Abhinav Valada
We look forward to welcoming you to our guest lecture.

The lecture will be followed by informal discussions with light snacks and drinks.

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Humanoid Robotics – Creating General-Purpose Functional Intelligence
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