The Humanoid Robots Lab at the University of Bonn in Germany, headed by Maren Bennewitz, is looking for three highly motivated and qualified PhD students (f/m/d), to start as soon as possible. The positions are in the following research areas:

1. VLM-Based Reasoning and Robotic Intervention in Greenhouses: Developing human-in-the-loop greenhouse robots that combine 3D crop perception, vision-language reasoning, and safe physical interventions such as inspection, leaf manipulation, and selective harvesting.
2. Multi-Robot Active Perception for Large-Scale Crop Mapping: Developing collaborative active perception and planning methods for heterogeneous teams of UAVs, quadruped robots, and ground robots to acquire complementary data for large-scale crop mapping and monitoring.
3. Active Perception and Manipulation for Mobile Robots: Developing active or task-oriented perception and manipulation methods for mobile robots to operate in complex, cluttered environments.

What we offer:

• Fully funded position according to TV-L E13 (100%)
• Access to state-of-the-art robotic platforms and research infrastructure, including humanoids, quadrupeds, mobile manipulators, UAVs, VR systems, motion-capture facilities, and high-performance computing resources
• Research on real-world robotic systems in an internationally diverse team
• Collaboration in major national and international projects such as PhenoRob, Robotics Institute Germany, and the Lamarr Institute
• Opportunities to publish at leading robotics and AI conferences and journals (e.g. ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, R-AL, T-RO, etc.)
• Located in Bonn, a scenic and international city on the Rhine, home to the University of Bonn, one of Germany's Excellence Universities and a national leader in Clusters of Excellence.

What we expect:
We are looking for highly motivated academically excellent students who conduct independent research on real-world robotic systems and collaborate within interdisciplinary projects.

• completed Master’s degree in computer science, robotics, artificial intelligence, or a closely related field (a BSc. degree alone is not sufficient);
• research experience in one or more relevant areas, such as active perception, robot planning, mobile manipulation, humanoid robotics, multi-robot systems, 3D reconstruction, semantic mapping, vision-language models, robot learning, or agricultural robotics;
• excellent programming skills and experience with real robotic systems, and deep learning frameworks, robot simulation, 3D sensing, mobile robots, legged locomotion, or humanoids is highly desirable;
• very good English communication skills;

The candidates are expected to publish scientific results, contribute to ongoing projects in the lab, and support the supervision of Bachelor’s and Master’s students.

Application:
The application deadline is July 5, 2026.

Please fill out the information below and upload one PDF file smaller than 8 MB containing your
1. CV,
2. Motivation Letter (max. 1 page), describing your background and relevant experience, your research interests and motivation for pursuing a PhD, and your fit to advertised positions​
3. Bachelor and Master transcript of records,
4. Links to the PDF file of your MSc thesis and/or papers you may have written
5. Links to your Github repository, personal website, linkedin page and google scholar page if any,
6. Names and contact information for two reference letters​​