What happens in the brain?

In his career, Luksch has worked with many different animal models, always with the question: How can an animal react correctly and quickly to environmental influences and new situations? How is this reaction represented in the brain? And finally: How can we achieve a similar performance with robots? "Animals have such simple components in the brain, and our technology is much more complex, but still has problems. For instance, robots lack the flexibility to deal with unknown conditions. "Moving around in a normal living room is already a challenge for a robot."

Luksch also habilitated in Aachen. "That wasn't necessarily my goal, but if you wanted to stay in science, there was no way around it," he says. Today, there are ways for up-and-coming researchers to be appointed at an early age, even without a habilitation.

Establishment of the Leonardo da Vinci Center

In 2007, Luksch made his way to the TU Munich, where he still works today. "At that time, a similar type of activity to that in Aachen had begun," explained the biologist. The Leonardo da Vinci Center for Bionics at the TUM was currently being established. Luksch was given the opportunity to help shape this development. Today, he runs the center himself, in which roboticians, biologists, electrical engineers, computer scientists and medical engineers are organized. "We are strengthening interdisciplinary work here because there is a lot of innovation to be found at the intersections," explains Luksch.

In order for interdisciplinarity to succeed, however, it is necessary to master the language of the other fields. Physicists and biologists, for example, have very different concepts of measurement accuracy. "Physicists often ask why we have not made a measurement ten times in order to achieve a more reliable result. We biologists are often happy if we have succeeded in measuring even once, for example when the material is difficult to obtain," smiles Luksch. His task at the Leonardo da Vinci Center is therefore to bring people together, organize workshops: "What does the other researcher do and what results does he already have?

From basic research to application

"We want to broaden the students' view for solutions beyond the classical approaches," stresses Luksch, who is also Dean of Studies for the Biosciences. Education is therefore an important area of responsibility for the Center. In addition, thanks to several major donors, the TU Munich has the means to allow students to put their own ideas into practice under the guidance of specialists. Sometimes the outcome is an innovative product.

Despite all its basic research, the center is also product-oriented. Research goals include, for example, improved hearing aids, deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease, signal reading in the brain to control robotics - from which paraplegics, for example, benefit -, automatically shaded building casings, structural electronics for lightweight construction and energy efficiency, as well as surface design for minimal soiling.

Making orientation easier for robots

At Luksch's chair itself, the team deals with how animals orient themselves, in particular how they combine the information of different senses. "We do have high-tech sensors, but nature is often better with its simple sensors because it connects them," explains the biologist. "We humans also combine vision and hearing and thus achieve a precise orientation reaction. In bats, ultrasound is added to vision, in rattlesnakes infrared perception. How does their brain connect this information, under which conditions are which sensors prioritized? The result could be algorithms that make orientation easier for robots.

The many different tasks mean that Luksch is at the university almost every day. "The work defines my everyday life," admits the professor. His wife and his two children, who are now almost adults, have to be very understanding, as he knows. Besides the family, there is little time left over for hobbies: "I like to work on a vintage car that I brought back from the USA," Luksch says. And of course the 53-year-old still likes to go on field trips "to keep the fascination for nature alive and to convey it to students". Faust's drive to understand the inner workings of the world, the tension between basic research and application - who better to put it in a nutshell than Luksch himself: "Our field of research is a great reserve of innovation - but you never know what the outcome will be."

Björn Lohmann