Max Planck Institutes and Experts

Robots acquire information from the environment, process it and then use it to autonomously perform tasks. A big challenge is to have robots and humans cooperate effectively in our every day’s life. To realize this vision the role of humans must be taken into account. Robot design and control must be conceived to meet the human needs and facilitate the interaction. Our research efforts are guided by these principles and aimed at realizing semi-autonomous robotic systems able to perform local tasks – supervised by a human – on their own in a so-called shared control scenario.

Model reduction significantly accelerates the computer simulation of dynamical systems. It facilitates or even enables their control and optimization. Thus, model reduction is becoming more and more an indispensable tool in computational sciences and engineering. The mathematical model of the dynamical process is replaced by a compact model. Simulating the compact model is then often sufficient to obtain the quantities of interest of the process. We will give a brief introduction into the model reduction of dynamical systems and illustrate its potential using some engineering applications.

During the last years HPC-clusters have become common even beyond the established computing centers. The increasing computing power implies higher technical demands on the infrastructure. In particular the efficient cooling of these systems poses a challenge.

At low speeds fluid flows are laminar and they turn turbulent as the flowrate is increased. The point at which turbulence first occurs cannot easily be predicted even for flows in very simple geometries. Ever since an investigation by Osborne Reynolds in the 19th century scientists tried to determine this point for the fundamentally most important case: pipe flow. Despite many attempts this problem remained unresolved for over 125 years. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Selforganization and colleagues from the University of Warwick could finally answer this question.

The occurrence of specialized natural products in single cells or cell types of plants and other organisms, the composition of the mixture of metabolites and their temporal concentration changes are challenging for chemical analytics because of tiny amounts of material. Despite it is of moderate sensitivity, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopic methods are useful to precisely determine the spatio-temporal distribution of metabolites. This is feasible especially if NMR is applied in combination with laser microdissection.