News
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.
ECMR 2025 Best Paper Award for Hendrik Surmann
Congratulations to Hendrik Surmann for winning the Best Paper Award at ECMR 2025 in Padua! The award recognizes his paper based on his master’s thesis on multi-objective autonomous driving.
AFCEA 2025 Second Prize for Allen Isaac Jose
Congratulations to Allen Isaac Jose for winning the Second Prize of the AFCEA Bonn e.V. Student Award 2025! The award honors his master's thesis, which was extended into an IROS 2025 paper on view motion planning in agricultural environments.
Strong Showing for HRL at IROS 2025: 8 Papers Accepted
HRL has had seven contributed papers plus one RA-L article accepted for presentation at IROS 2025, which will take place in Hangzhou, China this October. HRL’s strong outcome reflects both the quality and relevance of its current research, which spans semantic mapping, active perception, and reinforcement learning for manipulation and personalized mobile robot navigation
HRL at ICRA2025, Atlanta, USA
Our lab is presenting 3 full papers and 3 workshop papers at ICRA2025. Nils, Sicong, and Jorge will be attending the flagship robotics conference. Additionally, we are co-organising the Advances in Social Navigation: Planning, HRI and Beyond workshop.
5th Integration Week and 7th Consortium Meeting of RePAIR
The fifth integration week for the RePAIR project took place in Pompeii from 31 March to 5 April. Nils Dengler was there to support our project partners. Furthermore, the 7th consortium meeting took place and Maren Bennewitz and Nils Dengler discussed the latest developments in the project with our partners.