News
HRL at IROS 2026, Pittsburgh, USA
Niklas Mueller-Goldingen and Benno Wingender will present their work at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh on learning scene graphs for occlusion reasoning in pepper plants and on unified pick-and-place planning for the stable placement of unknown objects in confined environments. Furthermore, Maren Bennewitz will give an invited talk on human context in robot navigation at the Workshop on Social Robot Navigation.
Open PhD Positions at the Humanoid Robots Lab
The Humanoid Robots Lab at the University of Bonn is recruiting two fully funded PhD students (100% TV-L E13) to join our international research team.
Thesis Awards for Student Research Supervised by HRL PhD Candidate Rohit Menon
Niklas Mueller-Goldingen received the Bonner Informatik Group Best Thesis Award for his thesis conducted at the Humanoid Robots Lab, which also led to our joint IROS paper on SG-DOR. Yasmin Schmiede received the Grace Hopper Thesis Award for her thesis work conducted at Prof. Hermann Blum’s RPL lab. Both theses were supervised by HRL PhD candidate Rohit Menon, and we congratulate Niklas and Yasmin on this recognition.
Keynote at ICRA2026: Prof. Maren Bennewitz on Active Perception in Service Robotics
We are pleased to announce that Prof. Maren Bennewitz gave a keynote at the ICRA 2026 conference in Vienna on “Advancing Service Robots Through Active Perception.” Her talk focused on how service robots can actively perceive and better understand their environments, which is a central challenge in modern autonomous robotics.
HRL presents the PRIVATAR project at Bonn Science Night 2026
At Bonn Science Night 2026, taking place from May 21–22, 2026, we will present the PRIVATAR project as part of the AI research tent under the theme “Diagnosis: The Future”. Visitors can experience how telepresence robotics help sick children participate in school lessons remotely. The project combines human-robot interaction and privacy-aware design to explore how assistive technologies can support social participation in everyday life without violating sensitive data.
Beyond Physical Safety in Intelligent Robots (Besafe) Workshop proposal accepted for IEEE RO-MAN 2026 Conference
A half-day workshop examining what "safe enough" means when robots reason, communicate, and act with increasing autonomy, bringing together robotics, AI, cognitive science, and ethics at the IEEE RO-MAN 2026 conference in Kitakyushu, Japan.
HRL attends the German Robotics Conference and meets Minister Dorothee Bär
We are proud to share that we are local host of the 2nd German Robotics Conference (GRC) under the aegis of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG), taking place from March 11-13 in Cologne. We participate with multiple poster presentations, talks, demos, and a panel session on the inegration of robotics and AI. Furtheremore, we co-organize a Women in Robotics and AI networking event.
Niklas Mueller-Goldingen joins the lab as PhD student
Niklas Mueller-Goldingen, who completed his MSc in Computer Science at the University of Bonn and wrote his master’s thesis in our lab, has now joined us as a PhD student. His doctoral research will focus on topics related to the Phenorob 2 Cluster of Excellence. We’re excited to have him continue with the team.
Benno Wingender joins the lab as PhD student
Benno Wingender, who completed his MSc in Computer Science at the University of Bonn and wrote his master’s thesis in our lab, has now joined us as a PhD student. His doctoral research will focus on motion planning and manipulation in cluttered environments. We’re excited to have him continue with the team.
Final Horizon 2020 RePAIR Meeting
The final review meeting of our H2020 FET-Open project RePAIR took place in Pompeii. Together with our partners, we presented the developed robotic system, which is able to handle fragile frescoe fragments with precision and place them where the AI puzzle solver predicts they belong. Maren Bennewitz and Nils Dengler led the integration and evaluation of the full robotic platform.
IROS 2025 Workshop Best Poster Award for Rohit Menon: Perception and Planning for Mobile Manipulation
Congratulations to Rohit Menon for winning the Best Poster Award at IROS 2025 in the "Perception and Planning for Mobile Manipulation in Changing Environments" workshop! The award recognizes his work on active perception using open-vocabulary semantic search in scene-graphs.
HRL at IROS 2025, Hanghzou, China
Our lab is presenting 7 full, 1 RA-L, and 7 workshop papers at IROS2025! Nils, Sicong, Rohit, Murad, Ahmed, Shahram, and Jorge will be attending the flagship robotics conference.