An academic lab at ITU is a physical laboratory that seeks to encourage interaction between faculty, students and external stakeholders. There are both research and teaching labs – often combined. A lab has an academic responsible defining the overall aim and purpose of the lab. Additionally, a lab will typically have a lab manager who handles the daily administration.

The vision of the REAL lab is to do research on the border between fiction and fact, to create new, feasible solutions for the society of tomorrow. The lab has an interdisciplinary experimental practice and explores what-if scenarios using fundamental science and engineering to work towards the realization of these scenarios. Academically, the group is rooted in artificial intelligence with specific interests in robotics and evolutionary computation, but generally the research agenda is driven by opportunities arising both within science and in society.