Computer Vision News - February 2023

9 Katherine Kuchenbecker Katherine, you’re not from Stuttgart, right? No. Althoughmy last name sounds German, I am American. I grew up in Los Angeles, California, and I had German ancestors. But I learned to speak German when I moved here to Stuttgart. We would love to hear more about your work. What is Haptic Intelligence?  My main job is as a researcher, to lead a research team. I named my department Haptic Intelligence to try to capture an overarching theme. Most of the projects in our lab have to do with the sense of touch, with haptics, and also have to do with trying to accomplish a task or provide some useful technology. We work on two sides of the coin. On one side, which is more where I started in my research, our work is about providing haptic feedback to a human user, maybe in virtual reality or an operator controlling a robot. What kind of sensation should we measure or generate for them to feel and have a sense of touch to complement what they see and hear? And then, the other half of it, I started getting into when I was previously a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s here that I was in the GRASP Laboratory. I was the only one really working on human feedback, and everyone else was working on autonomous robots, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. It was in that environment that I saw the same kinds of signals I had been thinking I wanted to let a human feel them. Those are the exact same cues that a robot should be able to feel, to measure if it needs to manipulate objects in the world or physically interact with humans or the environment. So now, a lot of my research is also on tactile sensing, signal processing, sometimes for robots with machine learning to give them a Research is a team sport! Wolfram Scheible