News
Lu-Ching Wang joins as PhD student
Lu-Ching Wang, who completed his Masters in Electrical Engineering at the National Taiwan University joins our lab as a PhD student. His doctoral research will focus on topics related to the Phenorob 2 Cluster of Excellence.
Invited Presentation at Nature Conference
We are proud to announce that Maren Bennewitz was invited to speak at the Nature Conference on Autonomous Robotics at KAIST, South Korea. She gave a presentation on "Beyond Sensing: Active Perception for Search, Mapping, and Manipulation in Cluttered Environments” and discussed our research with the Nature editors.
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 Award for Benno Wingender
We are pleased to announce that Benno Wingender received the 3rd Best Thesis Award from AFCEA for his master's thesis conducted at the Humanoid Robots Lab. The thesis also led to a joint publication with his supervisor, Nils Dengler, at IROS 2026.
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.
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.