ELSEVIER

Robotics and Autonomous Systems 14 (1995) 233-244

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

Neural networks for the control of a six-legged walking machine

Karsten Berns a, Riidiger Dillmann b,,, Stefan Piekenbrock h
a Research Centre for Informatics, University of Karlsruhe, Haid-und-Neu Str. 10-14, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany b Institute for Real-Time Computer Systems and Robotics, University ofKarlsruhe, Kaiserstr. 12, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany

Abstract

In this paper a hierarchical control architecture for a six-legged walking machine is presented. The basic components of this architecture are neural networks which are taught in using examples of the control process. It is shown how the basic components "leg control" and "leg coordination" have been implemented by recurrent and feedforward networks; respectively. The teaching process and the tests of the walking behaviour have mainly been done in a simulation system. First tests of the leg control on our real walking machine LAURON are also described.
Keywords: Walking machine; Adaptive control concept; Neural networks

I. Introduction

In areas such as planetary exploration, oceanographic research or forestry studies walking machines are more successful than cycled or tracked vehicles. One of the greatest problems in the realization of walking machines is the control system which is responsible for the locomotion, the stability of the machine and the keeping to certain marginal requirements as for example low energy consumption. Tasks performed are the controlling of several actuators at the same time, the coordination of legs, the calculation of leg trajectories and foot set-up points as well as the adaptation of the movement to the environment. It is essential that all these calculations are carried out in real time (an introduction to the field of walking machines and their control architectures can be found in [2] and [14]).

* Corresponding author. E-mail: dillmann@ira.uka.de

In the last years biologists have carried out research to find out the walking mechanisms of insects [5]. Up to now it was not possible to apply all these control principles to a walking machine. The main reasons are that the control process is only partly understood and that the physical structure of a walking machine varies a lot from that of an insect. In order to achieve a walking behaviour comparable to that of insects, control algorithms based on units similar to biological neurons [1] are implemented. On the other hand, one tries to solve this problem through developing a control architecture consisting of rules that describe the walking process [15]. Neither of the approaches are adequate if a lot of environment information has to be considered such as in rough terrain. Therefore, our solution for the motion control of a walking machine is an architecture based on artificial neural networks [7,9]. Neural networks can learn control, work highly parallel, are faulttolerant as regards defects and have a high adap-

0921-8890/95/$09.50 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0921-8890(94)1)0032-8

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Fig. 1. The walking machine LAURON.

tivity offering a promising alternative to traditional control structures. The neural control architecture presented in this paper is applied to the kinematic control of a six-legged walking machine. The neural control architecture has been tested on both a kinematic simulation system and

the walking machine LAURON (see Fig. 1). Its lower two levels consist of neural networks trained in a supervised way by RPROP [13]. A representative set of typical movements is necessary in order to teach these networks. A stick-insect-like wooden model called INSECT has been con-

velocity, task
Reactive I Element Leg . Coordination ~ e c ~ velocity,lphase ~ ~ Leg Coordination I ~ velocity, phase

(" Leg Controller ~ (" Leg Controller ")]~f/~ ~/~ ) f Leg Controller "~(" Leg Controller ") [,.forTransfer Phase) [,for Support P h a s e J ~ [ , f o r Transfer Phase) [,for Support PhaseJ
Fig. 2. The hierarchical control architecture.

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structed to generate training data. INSECT is equipped with 18 potentiometers (one for each joint) which are used to measure the joint angles when moving the model by hand. In the following: the control architecture is described.

2. Control architecture

The control system is hierarchically organised and consists of thre, e layers (see Fig 2). This has two main reasons: First, a separation in small modules is necessary to make it possible to generate representative training data for the neural control modules. Second, because of security reasons one must guarantee that each of the modules works correctly in every situation. The verification process is easier when using a hierarchical architecture.

The lowest level of our control architecture consists of leg controlers SLC (see Section 3) for the transfer and support phase. Each of the six controlers of the transfer phase is responsible for one of the six legs if it is in the return stroke. Each leg has the parameters velocity and stride length (sl), height (sh) and direction (sd). The leg controllers for the support phase are responsible for the legs having ground contact. The parameters of these modules are the velocity at the center of gravity of the walking machine as well as the height of the machine, and the distance to be covered during the support phase. The next level of control is the leg coordination LC (see Section 4). It is used for generating gait patterns, e.g. a tripod or wave gait. The leg coordination modules deliver as parameters for the leg controllers the velocity and the phase desired for each leg. The reactive element R E (see Section 5) evalu-

Fig. 3. The INSECT-modelfor the generation of training data.

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K. Berns et aL /Robotics and Autonomous Systems 14 (1995) 233-244 joint angles offset

ates sensory input in order to determine a gait pattern and a direction of movement suited to the environment. It can for example decide whether the machine should avoid an obstacle or climb over it. The reactive element also selects the best leg coordination module depending on the sensor input.

0.8 0.2 angle contru~ parameters state layer

3. Learning control of the legs

For the generation of training data for leg movements in transfer and support phase the insect model is used (see Fig. 3). The insect-model has the same geometry as our walking machine LAURON. It delivers 1000 joint-angle measurements per second when moving by hand the legs (transfer phase) or the body of the walking machine (support phase). In this way typical movements of a leg in the transfer phase as well as the movements of the legs in the support phase can be measured. In the support phase the goal of the control algorithm is to find an efficient movement of the body of the walking machine in any direction. In addition, changes in the height of the body should be achieved. Legs in the transfer phase should be controlled in a way that areas could be reached where ground contact is possible. For both cases the control problem is to generate typical sequences of joint angles dependent on the abovementioned parameters. For learning trajectories in the support and transfer phase Jordan [7] and Elman [5] networks have been examined. In the following only the results from Elman networks are presented as they have proved more powerful than Jordan networks. In comparison to feedforward networks Elman networks have an additional state layer, in which the activation of the neurons of the first hidden layer is stored. These state neurons are used during the next processing step as an additional input to the first hidden layer. The idea of this approach is that the input neurons specify the trajectory while the state neurons are used to calculate the next output of the actual sequence. Six input neurons are used for learning the transfer phase. Three of them

Fig. 4. Structure of an Elman network for the transfer phase.

represent the joint angles, while the other 3 are the control parameters stride length, stride height, and stride direction. They are classified in minimal (neuron value 0.1), normal (0.5) and maximal (0.9). The 3 output neurons deliver an offset to the joint angles (interval between - 3 and + 3 degrees). Fifty different trajectories consisting of a sequence of 50 offsets of joint angles over time are used for learning the transfer phase. In Fig. 4 the structure of the Elman network is presented. The test of the transfer and the support phase of one leg has been performed on both the kinematic simulation system as well as on the walking machine LAURON. As a result the Elman network has been able to control the leg on different trajectories. For the transfer phase several experiments have been carried out where the starting position and the 3 parameters were changed. It was shown that the leg moves correctly if the derivation of the joint angles from the normal starting position is within a range of + 10%. Variation of the parameters causes a correct change of the shape of the trajectory. The generalisation property of the Elman network also allows the use of parameters that were not included in the training set. For example, the value of the stride length 0.9 means that the distance of the leg in the direction of the body movement should be about 40 cm during one return stroke whereas a value of 0.5 moves the leg 25 cm. If a stride length of 0.8 is chosen, a distance of about 35 cm will be covered. Fig. 5 shows some results

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237

errl ~._ 0.9,0.ilk 35 ~k

.~ 0.9_0.521_

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-- -- 7 . I I 0.8,d.7/ / 07"0-3 070~ i

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phase where several leg controllers are compiled together to move the machine was only tested in our simulation system. A test on L A U R O N was not possible because small derivations of the leg trajectories of the power stroke cause a bracing of the machine which could lead to a destruction of the gears or the legs. For the test on LAURON additional sensor samples must be considered which determine these forces.

4. Learning of the leg coordination

The task of the LC is to coordinate the autonomous movements of the legs. Especially it has to decide whether a leg may lift off the ground starting a transfer phase or whether it may start a support phase after touch down. Therefore, the LC receives two values from each SLC: (a) Information about ground contact (yes or no), and (b) a value in the interval [0.1] encoding the position of the foot. Due to kinematic restrictions the maximum length of the trajectory the leg can move is limited. At the lower end the upper limits are encoded by 0.0 and 1.0 so that a value in between indicates how far the leg has moved on the trajectory. Data sent to each single leg controller consists of the desired phase (transfer or support) and velocity represented by values between 0.0 (stop) and 1.0 (maximum velocity). The implementation of the LC can be based on algorithms which implement a set of rules reported by [5]. A detailed description of such an LC can be found in [15]. The disadvantage of this approach is that the programmer has to think of all situations possible in order to provide appropriate reactions. Therefore, we chose to use Backpropagation-Networks. In the following we show that the generalisation property of these networks can be exploited in order to reduce the load of programming because they can react properly even in situations they were not trained
on.

0:~

-15

-5 start-

15

-"'cm

position
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Fig. 5. Contact points made by the foot after serveral return strokes with different control parameters. For this experiment the starting position is fixed but the stride length and direction are changed (first and second value near the foot point).

of the Elman network used to control the right middle leg of L A U R O N in different trajectories of the transfer phase. The support phase was taught in a similar way. The Elman network has 19 input neurons, 20 neurons in the first and also second hidden layer and 9 output neurons. The two state layers consist of 20 neurons each. The output neurons deliver offsets to the joint angles comparable to those of the network in the transfer phase. The input neurons represent the 9 joint angles of the legs which have ground contact, the distance which the center of gravity of the walking machine should be mewed in the x-y-z-direction during the support phase, the rotation of the body of the walking machine around the x-y-z-axis, the rotation of the walking machine after the support phase and actual height of the walking machine body. Eighty trajectories each consisting of 50 measurements of a support phase were selected for the learning process. The results of the test were similar to those of the transfer phase. The networks of the power stroke generate correct movements according to the control parameters. The test of the power stroke for each leg was also done on L A U R O N . Up to now, the support

In order to generate a training set for the Backpropagation-Network, a leg coordination based on a subset of the rules described in [5] was implemented. These rules prevent legs from starting a support or transfer phase if legs of the other

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K. Berns et al. // Robotics and Autonomous Systems 14 (1995) 233-244

(a)
m

, m

Co)
m m m

(c)
Fig. 6. Gait patterns when walking on stairs: (a) the rule based control, (b) Net 1, (c) Net 2. Black lines indicate ground contact. The upper three rows represent the left legs of the walking machine.

tripod still touch or do not touch the ground respectively. Fig. 6a shows the ground contact over time when climbing up a stair. It illustrates some of the problems arising. At the beginning an undisturbed tripod gait is generated. When starting to climb up the stairs, the first left leg touches ground earlier than the other legs of the tripod (the third black line in the uppermost row of Fig. 6a). Afterwards the transfer phase of the other legs is prolonged. This is due to the height control: As we used a kinematic simulation, all joint angles have to be calculated by the controllers in discrete time steps. As a result when a leg is moved down in order to touch the ground, the single leg controller calculates the right joint angles. If height controllers of other legs increase the body height, the leg will not touch the ground at the target position. On the right hand side of the diagram one can see that a leg sometimes touches the ground and is then lifted off immediately afterwards. This is also caused by the height control. The training set of the neural network only consisted of patterns representing an undisturbed

tripod gait: The machine was controlled by the rule-based LC in an empty environment. Training patterns consisting of the input to and the output from the LC were collected during operation and stored in a file. The velocity was set to a fixed value in the support phase while in the transfer phase a parabolic function was used. All data was encoded in the interval [0.1] as sigmoid activation functions were used in the network. Different topologies of networks were tested. In our experiments one hidden layer with 10 neurons proved to be successful. All patterns in the training set were learnt correctly after 2000 epochs of learning using the R P R O P algorithm. When learning is continued, the total error made by the network still decreases as all data is rounded outside the network. In the following the achieved results of two networks are shown. They were created after 2000 (Net 1) and 6500 epochs (Net 2) respectively. Fig. 6b shows the behaviour of Net 1. The walking machine climbs up the stairs. The quality of the network is not as "good" as the rule-based leg coordination. One has to keep in mind, however, that no knowledge on appropriate reactions

Fig. 7. Gait patterns on a slope: Net 2.

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(a)

(b)

Fig. 8. The simulated walking machine: (a) with Net 2 when walking up stairs; (b) with the rule-based leg coordination when walking over a ditch.

to obstacles was provided in the training set. Only due to, the generalisation the network is able to generate commands enabling the machine to walk up stairs. On the other hand, Fig. 6c illustrates the loss of generalisation if the training cycle time is too long. In this experiment the simulation was stopped prematurely by the SLC of the leg in the middle on the left hand side. In this situation the first two legs are on the next step resulting in a transfer phase of the middle legs being longer than normal. Problems arise when the leg coordination starts a transfer phase of one leg when there are not enough other legs available to support the body. If the leg is lifted off the ground the height of the body is reduced which disturbes the movements of the other legs. Fig. 8a illustrates the effect of such a behaviour. Another example of an inappropriate behaviour caused by the overtrained network is shown in Fig. 7. In this case all velocities are set to 0 by the leg coordination, so that the machine stops walking. Fig. 9a illustrates the simplicity of the implemented rules. The leg coordination fails to start a

transfer phase at the rear leg on the left side. Therefore, its SLC stops this simulation after a while. Fig. 8b shows the situation. As shown in Fig. 9b Net 1 is even better than the rules. The neural leg coordination finds appropriate commands and the machine surmounts the obstacle.

5. The reactiveelement
The task of the R E is to find an appropriate direction of movement in order to avoid collisons with obstacles. Walking machines driven by a human operator were already constructed for this purpose [8]. In our implementation of the R E however, we focus on autonomous navigation. This task has been investigated for mobile robots equipped with wheels. But in contrast to walking machines these robots often consider only two-dimensional maps of the environment. This is sufficient because vehicles cannot climb over obstacles, so they only have to know whether there is

(a)I

Z Z Z ",Z Z

ZZ

Z:_

--'-~m . . . . . I n m

Fig. 9. Gait patterns in a ditch: (a) Rule-based leg coordination;(b) Net 1.

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surmountable obstacle

unsurmountable obstacle

Fig. 10. T h e two different kinds of sensors: long range detector (LRD) and short range detector (SRD).

an obstacle because of which the direction of movement has to be changed. Experiments with an autonomous walking machine in a three-dimensional environment were already carried out for " A m b l e r " [10] using a laser range scanner. But as L A U R O N is of small size such a large sensor device is inappropriate. We think that distance m e a s u r e m e n t by sensors based on laser beams is a promising approach because such devices exist nowadays in very small sizes. These sensor devices are mounted on the body in different inclination angles. Two different kinds of distance sensors can be distinguished (see Fig. 10). Sensor input to the R E are: Distances measured by the laser beams. Due to their technology only distances up to a maxi-

m u m range can be detected. This range has to be sufficiently large so that after detection of an obstacle there still is enough space for the machine to turn left or right. As there are surmountable and unsurmountable obstacles which cannot be distinguished only by a set of values measured at time t, also previously measured values are taken into account. As a consequence, the R E bases its decisions on a sequence of distance measures ("time window"). Inclination angles of the body according to the horizontal (x-y)-plane. An internal signal of the LC indicating that it is not able to generate the desired pattern. This normally occurs when a leg is not able to touch the ground at the end of a swing phase or when it cannot move on the desired trajectory due to kinematic or dynamic restrictions. Possible en-

lower parts of control system

Fig. 11. The internal structure of the Reactive Element.

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vironments for these two cases are precipices and stairs which are too high. The task of the machine is to walk autonomously without collision in previously unknown environments. Therefore appropriate reactions on obstacles have to be found. No target position is given. During operation the machine has to find out which kind of obstacles can be surmounted. There is no operator like in [16]. At the beginning no knowledge about obstacles is available as the environments may be very complex. Therefore no set of training patterns suitable for supervised learning is available. The machine can only detect if something is going wrong. The internal structure of the R E is shown in Fig. 11. The task of the exception handler is to survey the sensor input. If data is out of a legal range then the machine is stopped and a modification of the valuation moclule occurs. This case is called a collision. Note that this does not necessarily mean a real impact on the environment which might destroy the machine. The selection of an action takes place according to the values of the actions. Simply the best action is selected. If this choice is not unequivocal a list of preferences is used. The most critical task is the valuation of the actions and its modification during operation. The valuation of one action is independent of the valuation of the other ones. Therefore there is one network n a for each aeA, where A is the finite set of all available actions. For the selection of an appropriate type of network to implement n a three facts were taken into consideration: (1) It is desirable that similar situations result in similar values. This similarity can be expressed by the Euclidean distance between to input vectors. (2) Knowledge about the correct valuation is. only collected during operation. No training set is available at the beginning. (3) By detecting collision the unappropriateness of an action chosen can be measured. Therefore, each n a is a hybrid network consisting of a layer of RBF-units [4,7] and a second layer with a network of type "winner-takes-all". The prototypes of the RBF-units in n a represent situations in which the selection of a led to a collision. It is obvious that the value for such an

action should be very small. All RBF-units calculate their activation e according to Eq. (1), depending on the Euclidean distance d between their prototype and the input vector. min if + min if

d <p, p<d<q,

d-p e( d) = / ( 1 . 0 - m i n ) - q-p
1,1.0

else.

(1)
The constant q of Eq. (1) denotes the maximum range of influence of one RBF unit. Therefore, if the machine is in a new situation which is not similar to the one encountered before the value of e(d) is maximal. This ensures that the machine tries out all possible actions, e(d) is an unprecise approximation of a mirrored Gaussian function, Its advantage is that it is much easier to calculate. The network of type "winner-takes-all" calculates the minimum of all activations of the RBFunits in the previous layer. No weighted sum of the activations is needed because the R E is only interested in the worst case. Therefore overlapping regions of influence of RBF-units are no problem. Learning takes place if a collision is detected. In this case it is assumed that not only the last action chosen was wrong but that also events in the past have to be taken into account. Therefore in normal mode the sensor input s, the chosen action a and its value va are stored a s (s,a;Ua) t in an internal ring buffer of fixed size k. This is necessary because if the machine wants to turn left or right it takes some time steps to do so. Consider a collision while moving straight forward: If only the last action was considered then a change to the left or right would immediately lead to another collision because the machine is too near the obstacle and there is not enough space to operate successfully. Of course, the machine could go backwards but it is much more desirable that the machine turns left or right some time steps before. If the exception handler indicates a collision, values in the ring buffer are processed in back-

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ward order for t = - i to k. For t 0 = - 1 following procedure is applied:

the

if a t = at0 then s t is once again fed into n a t which calculates ~,t if v.t --- t~'at then a new RBF-unit with a prototype equal to s t is inserted in n a t if d > a in Eq. (1). Otherwise min is decreased (down to a minimal value of 0.0). So in both cases the value of a in situation s t is decreased. else nothing is to be done as the value of a was already decreased by previous steps. This can happen if s t is inside the range of influence of a previously inserted or modified RBF-unit. else S e t ten d = t and stop. The stepwise diminuation of min ensures that an action can be chosen again if all the others did not succeed. This may be useful in difficult terrain. After the modification the machine has to step back at least tend steps. It reaches a point on its trajectory where is has already been and can now proceed in normal operation. As the valuation has been modified the behaviour will now differ.

Fig. 12a shows a complex environment. It consists of stairs going up and down, a small surmountable ditch and an unsurmountable hole. Fig. 12b shows the resulting trajectory of the machine when it started without any knowledge. It first walks forward. When it approaches the wall a collision occurs. The machine steps back and modifies the valuation of the action forward so that another action is now chosen when the machines continues to go forward. After some trials it has learnt to avoid the unsurmountable wall appropriately. Afterwards it climbs up the stairs. In the corner it needs some more trials to turn left. In the third corner the machine reacts appropriately. When it reaches the small ditch one leg steps inside it. As this leg cannot touch the ground in the ditch the LC indicates the exception to the RE. Therefore the machine steps back. Due to a certain inaccurary of the single-leg controllers it now reaches another position than the one it started from. As a consequence the ditch can now be surmounted as all legs step over it. Fig. 12c shows the results when the machine is put back to its starting position. Due to the knowledge acquired during the first round it now turns left in the first corner. In the second corner some more trials are necessary because the machine reaches this corner at a position that is too different from the position in the first round. In this way the behaviour of the machine is

)~

---.

)~

(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig. 12. (a) Tests in a complex environment, (b) the firsttimc, (c) the second timc using thc knowledge acquired bcforc.

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improved during operation. As the machine only reacts on local information provided by the sensor beams the method described above is independent from the geometry of the obstacles.

References
[1] R.D. Beer, H.J. Chiel, R.D. Quinn and P.A. Larsson, Distributed neural network architecture for hexapod robot locomotion, Neural Computation 4 1992 356-365. [2] K. Berns and M. Fiegert, Laufmaschinen - v o n der Fiktion zur Realit~it, Technische Rundschau 46 (1991) 42-51. [3] K. Berns, B. Miiller and R. Dillmann, Dynamic control of a robot leg with selforganizing feature maps, Proc. 1993 RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Yokohama, Japan (1993) 553-560. [4] M.R. Berthold, The TDRBF: A shift invariant radial basis function network, Proc. Fourth Irish Neural Network Conference, Dublin, Ireland (Sept. 1994). [5] H. Cruse, What mechanisms coordinate leg movements in arthropods?, Trends in Neurosciences 13 (1) (1990) 15-21. [6] J. Elman, Finding structure in time, Cognitive Science 14 (1990) 172-211. [7] St.I. Gallant, Neural Network Learning and Expert Systems (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993). [8] K.K. Hartikainen, A.J. Halme, H. Lehtinen and K.O. Koskinen, MECANT I: A six legged walking machine for research purposes in outdoor environment, Proc. 1992 IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Nice, France (1992) 157-163. [9] J. Herz, A. Krogh and R. Palmer, Introduction to the Theory of Neural Computation (Addison Wesley, New York, 1991). [10] R. Hoffman and E. Krotkov, Terrain mapping for longduration autonomous walking, Proc. 1992 IEEE / RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems Raleigh, NC (1992) 563-568. [11] M.I. Jordan, Supervised learning and systems with excess degree of freedom, Technical Report COINS-88-27, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Boston MA, 1988. [12] St. Piekenbrock and R. Dillmann, Reaktive Steuerung einer Laufmaschine mittels Neuronaler Netze veriinderlicher Topologie, in: P. Levi, Th. Briiunl, eds., Autonome Mobile Systeme 1994 (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1994) 8-19. [13] M. Riedmiller and H. Braun, A direct adaptive method for faster backpropagation learning: The RPROP algorithm, Proc. Int. Conf. on Neural Networks, San Francisco, CA (1993) 586-592. [14] S. Song and K.J. Waldron, Machines That Walk: The Adaptive Suspension Vehicle (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989). [15] H.-J. Weidemann, Dynamik und Regelung von sechsbeinigen Robotern und natiirlichen Hexapoden, VDIFortschrittsberichte, Series 8, No. 362 (VDI-Verlag, 1993). [16] D. Wettergreen, C. Thorpe and W. Whittaker Exploring Mount Erebus by a walking robot, Proc. Int. Conf. on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Pittsburgh, PA (1993) 172-181.

6. Conclusion
In this paper a hierarchical neural network architecture for the control of walking machines has been described. All learning algorithms, used to develop the modules leg controller and leg coordination, are based on supervised trained RPROP networks. The leg controllers are able to perform return strokes on typical trajectories and move the walking machine in the support phase in any direction. Leg coordination is taught to generate a tripod gait. It is shown that the generalisation of Backpropagation-Networks can be exploited if the training is stopped in time. We also show that the selection of an appropriate reaction on obstacles can be learned by the use of RBF networks without any knowledge given at the beginning. The next step in the research will be the optimisation of the control parameters as well as the applications of the reactive element for more complex environments. We will also focus our attention on the learning of dynamic control. A first result was that the dynamic control of a leg in the transfer phase was learnt using selforganising feature maps [3]. One of the problems of supervised learning is that many training data must be available for the learning phase. As it is difficult to generate all data before the operation, we will extend the algorithms for the two lowest levels so that on-line modification is possible.

Acknowledgements
The research which is reported here has been carried out at the Forschungszentrum Informatik and the Institute for Real Time Process Control and Robotics at the University of Karlsruhe (group Prof. Dillmann). The work has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG Di 330/4-2).

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K. Berns et al. / Robotics and Autonomous Systems 14 (1995) 233-244 Karsten Berns has been researcher at the Research Center for Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe since 1989. There, he is leader of the group Interactive Planning. His research area is the application of neural networks in the field of robotics. In his Ph.D thesis, Feb. 1994, he examined the use of neural network for the control of a six-legged walking machine. Riidiger DUlmann studied electrical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe. He joined the Faculty for Informatics in 1977. In 1980 he received the Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering and took the position of an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Karlsruhe. In 1986 he obtained his habilitation in Computer Science. In 1987 he got the position of a university professor in Computer Science and was appointed director of the CAD/CAM/Robotics Group of the Institute for Real-Time Computer Control Systems and Robotics. He is head of the research group 'Interactive Techniques for Planning' of the FZI-Karlsruhe. His general research activities are related to robotics with emphasis to: CAD/CAM/Robotic-integration: Hierarchical robot control, Robot simulation systems, Autonomous mobile robots, Robot machine learning, Telerobotics, Virtual Reality Applications. He is a member of IFAC/MANTECH, VDI-GMA and GI. He published several books and editorials and wrote more than 80 scientific and technical papers.

Stefan Piekenbrock received his M.S. degree in 1991. Since then he has been research assistant at the Institut for Real Time Computer Systems and Robotics at the University of Karlsruhe.