Research

Active Perception

Active perception tries to answer the question of where to look at to gain more information. This is an important task in any application where occlusions appear and scenes need to be observed from different angles. Especially for robots operating in complex unstructured environments, active perception is key to efficient spatio-temporal mapping.

Active Perception
Active Perception

Associated Researchers

Nils Dengler

M.Sc.

Nils Dengler

Ph.D. Student

Rohit Menon

M.Sc.

Rohit Menon

Ph.D. Student

Niklas Mueller-Goldingen

M.Sc.

Niklas Mueller-Goldingen

Ph.D. Student

Sicong Pan

M.Sc.

Sicong Pan

Ph.D. Student

Phenorob - Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production

Phenorob - Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production

PhenoRob performs world-leading research in robotics and phenotyping for sustainable crop production. Our vision is to transform crop production by optimizing breeding and farming management through developing and deploying new technologies. PhenoRob addresses a real-world problem with a technology-oriented approach. Our scientists have backgrounds in computer science, geodesy, robotics, plant science, soil science, economics, and environmental science. This interdisciplinary team forms the only DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence focusing on agriculture.

AID4Crops - Automation and AI for Monitoring and Decision Making of Horticultural Crops

AID4Crops - Automation and AI for Monitoring and Decision Making of Horticultural Crops

AID4Crops will bring together research about what can be sensed with what should be sensed. To do this, we will develop novel AI algorithms to enable autonomous monitoring (sensing) and management (forecasting and decision making) for horticultural crops. These approaches will be deployed in horticulture as it provides a set of realistic yet challenging environments with crops grown both indoors (in glasshouses) and outdoor (in orchards); the indoor environment provides greater control over the growth of the crops.

GO-VMP: Global Optimization for View Motion Planning in Fruit Mapping

GO-VMP: Global Optimization for View Motion Planning in Fruit Mapping

A. Isaac Jose, S. Pan, T. Zaenker, R. Menon, S. Houben, M. Bennewitz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025

Map Space Belief Prediction for Manipulation-Enhanced Mapping

Map Space Belief Prediction for Manipulation-Enhanced Mapping

J.M.C Marques, N. Dengler, T. Zaenker, J. Mücke, S. Wang, M. Bennewitz, K. Hauser

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2025

Safe Leaf Manipulation for Accurate Shape and Pose Estimation of Occluded Fruits

Safe Leaf Manipulation for Accurate Shape and Pose Estimation of Occluded Fruits

S. Yao, S. Pan, M. Bennewitz, K. Hauser

IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2025

DM-OSVP++: One-Shot View Planning Using 3D Diffusion Models for Active RGB-Based Object Reconstruction

DM-OSVP++: One-Shot View Planning Using 3D Diffusion Models for Active RGB-Based Object Reconstruction

S. Pan, L. Jin, X. Huang, C. Stachniss, M. Popović, M. Bennewitz

Arxiv Pre-print, 2025

Integrating One-Shot View Planning with a Single Next-Best View via Long-Tail Multiview Sampling

Integrating One-Shot View Planning with a Single Next-Best View via Long-Tail Multiview Sampling

S. Pan, H. Hu, H. Wei, N. Dengler, T. Zaenker, M. Dawood, M. Bennewitz

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2024

Exploiting Priors from 3D Diffusion Models for RGB-Based One-Shot View Planning

Exploiting Priors from 3D Diffusion Models for RGB-Based One-Shot View Planning

S. Pan, L. Jin, X. Huang, C. Stachniss, M. Popović, M. Bennewitz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024

HortiBot: An Adaptive Multi-Arm System for Robotic Horticulture of Sweet Peppers

HortiBot: An Adaptive Multi-Arm System for Robotic Horticulture of Sweet Peppers

C. Lenz, R. Menon, M. Schreiber, M.P. Jacob, S. Behnke, M. Bennewitz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024

Active Implicit Reconstruction Using One-Shot View Planning

Active Implicit Reconstruction Using One-Shot View Planning

H. Hu, S. Pan, L. Jin, M. Popović, M. Bennewitz

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

How Many Views Are Needed to Reconstruct an Unknown Object Using NeRF?

How Many Views Are Needed to Reconstruct an Unknown Object Using NeRF?

S. Pan, L. Jin, H. Hu, M. Popović, M. Bennewitz

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

Perception for Humanoid Robots

Perception for Humanoid Robots

A. Roychoudhury, S. Khorshidi, S. Agrawal, M. Bennewitz

Springer Nature, Current Robotics Reports, 2023

Viewpoint Push Planning for Mapping of Unknown Confined Spaces

Viewpoint Push Planning for Mapping of Unknown Confined Spaces

N. Dengler, S. Pan, V. Kalagaturu, R. Menon, M. Dawood, M. Bennewitz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023

NBV-SC: Next Best View Planning based on Shape Completion for Fruit Mapping and Reconstruction

NBV-SC: Next Best View Planning based on Shape Completion for Fruit Mapping and Reconstruction

R. Menon, T. Zaenker, N. Dengler, M. Bennewitz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023

Graph-based View Motion Planning for Fruit Detection

Graph-based View Motion Planning for Fruit Detection

T. Zaenker, J. Rückin, R. Menon, M. Popovic, M. Bennewitz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023

Fruit Mapping with Shape Completion for Autonomous Crop Monitoring

Fruit Mapping with Shape Completion for Autonomous Crop Monitoring

S. Marangoz, T. Zaenker, R. Menon, M. Bennewitz

IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2022

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Next-Best-View Planning in Agricultural Applications

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Next-Best-View Planning in Agricultural Applications

X. Zeng, T. Zaenker, M. Bennewitz

IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2022

Combining Local and Global Viewpoint Planning for Fruit Coverage

Combining Local and Global Viewpoint Planning for Fruit Coverage

T. Zaenker, C. Lehnert, C. McCool, M. Bennewitz

European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR), 2021

Online Object-Oriented Semantic Mapping and Map Updating

Online Object-Oriented Semantic Mapping and Map Updating

N. Dengler, T. Zaenker, F. Verdoja, M. Bennewitz

European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR), 2021

Region of Interest based Viewpoint Selection

Viewpoint Planning for Fruit Size and Position Estimation

T. Zaenker, M. Bennewitz

Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021

PATHoBot: A Robot for Glasshouse Crop Phenotyping and Intervention.

PATHoBot: A Robot for Glasshouse Crop Phenotyping and Intervention.

C. Smitt, M. Halstead, T. Zaenker, M. Bennewitz, C. McCool

IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2021

Gradient and Log-based Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation of Crop and Weed for Agricultural Robots

Gradient and Log-based Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation of Crop and Weed for Agricultural Robots

R. Sheikh, A. Milioto, P. Lottes, C. Stachniss, M. Bennewitz, T. Schultz

Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2020

Speeding Up Person Finding Using Hidden Markov Models

Speeding Up Person Finding Using Hidden Markov Models

A. Bayoumi, P. Karkowski, M. Bennewitz

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2019

GPU-Accelerated Next-Best-View Exploration of Articulated Scenes

GPU-Accelerated Next-Best-View Exploration of Articulated Scenes

S. Oßwald, M. Bennewitz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018