Georgia Chalvatzaki, independent research group leader at TU Darmstadt, discusses her path into robotics, her research plans, and the role of TIAGo++ in her lab’s work.
Chalvatzaki leads the Intelligent Robotics for Assistance group at TU Darmstadt. After studying electrical engineering and completing a PhD focused on assistive robotics in Athens, she joined Jan Peters’s group as a postdoc in 2019 to work on robot learning. A high school project first sparked her interest, and she describes balancing work, family support, and undergraduate study as difficult.
In 2021, Chalvatzaki received an Emmy Noether grant from the German Research Foundation. She says it gives her the independence to set research directions and build her own group. She sees it as a step toward her goal of becoming a professor.
Chalvatzaki describes TIAGo++ as a core research tool across projects including RoboTrust, iROSA, and HERON. Her team studies mobile grasping, including planning the robot’s approach and pose so objects remain reachable. In HERON, operators teleoperate the robot for two hours, using its manual controls to handle manipulation tasks.
Chalvatzaki identifies linking perception with robot action as a major challenge. Robots need to sense how their surroundings change, form useful world models, and plan accordingly. Tasks such as bin picking can be constrained, but operating freely, for example choosing how to approach an object or open a door, involves many possible actions.
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Georgia Chalvatzaki, independent research group leader at TU Darmstadt, discusses robot learning and mobile manipulation research with PAL Robotics’ host, including work with TIAGo and TIAGo++.
Georgia Chalvatzaki, a research group leader at TU Darmstadt and postdoc in Jan Peters’s Intelligent Autonomous Systems group, presents work on speeding up robot learning from demonstrations and learned models at the University of Toronto’s AI in Robotics Seminar.
