News

April 2024

Our team NimbRo won the @Home league competition of the service robots at RoboCup German Open in Kassel. [Press release]

  

March 2024

The BMBF-funded project "UMDenken: Supportive monitoring of turntable ladder operations for firefighting using IR images" starts. Our group works on the sub-project "Autonomous flying robot for firefighting support".

 

October 2023

The project "Development of shared autonomy control framework and AI-based application technology for enhancing tasks of hyper realistic telepresence robots in unstructured environment" started in collaboration with Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH), Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, and Korea Telecom (KT), funded by Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT). University of Bonn will work on the sub-project "Immersive Televisualization".

      

August 2023

The paper Malte Mosbach and Sven Behnke: "Learning Generalizable Tool Use with Non-rigid Grasp-pose Registration" received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE 19th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) in Auckland, New Zealand.

July 2023

The soccer robots of our team NimbRo defended their title in the Humanoid League AdultSize class at RoboCup 2023 in Bordeaux, France. [Press release]

 

June 2023

Ani Karapetyan received the BIG Master Thesis Award of the Bonner Informatik-Gesellschaft e.V. for her thesis "Video Prediction at Multiple Levels with Hierarchical Recurrent Networks". It was published at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC): [Project Page]

December 2022

The paper Mojtaba Hosseini, Diego Rodriguez, and Sven Behnke: "State Estimation for Hybrid Locomotion of Driving-Stepping Quadrupeds" received the Best Paper Award at the 6th IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC) in Naples, Italy.

Marcin Namysł successfully defended his PhD thesis PhD thesis "Robust Information Extraction From Unstructured Documents".

November 2022

Jörg Wagner successfully defended his PhD thesis "Robust and Interpretable Visual Perception using Deep Neural Networks".

Our team NimbRo Avatar wins the grand prize of 5 Million US$ at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Competition. [Press release]

The project "WestAI - AI Service Center West" is funded by BMBF. [Press release]

October 2022

The project "Autonomous flying robot swarms for real-time situational awareness" is funded by BMBF as part of the German Rescue Robotics Center (DRZ). [Press release]

September 2022

Michael Gref successfully defended his PhD thesis "Robust Speech Recognition via Adaptation for German Oral History Interviews"

Our NimbRo Humanoid Soccer robots are demonstrated at the Grand Opening of the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligenc.

July 2022

The soccer robots of our team NimbRo won all competitions of Humanoid League AdultSize class at RoboCup 2022 in Bangkok, Thailand: 2 vs. 2 soccer tournament, 2 vs. 2 drop-in games, technical challenges, and Best-humanoid Award.

 

Andre Rochow received the BIG Bachelor Thesis Award of the Bonner Informatik-Gesellschaft e.V. for his thesis "Novel View Synthesis from Single and Multiple Cameras". It was published at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS): [Project Page]

June 2022 

The paper Arash Amini, Arul Selvam Periyasamy, and Sven Behnke: "YOLOPose: Transformer-based Multi-Object 6D Pose Estimation using Keypoint Regression" received the Best Paper Award at the 17th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) in Zagreb, Croatia.

 

The Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence receives institutional fundign from BMBF and the federal state of NRW.
[Press release]

          

January 2022

Marius Beul successfully defended his PhD thesis "Fast Time-optimal Trajectory Generation for Jerk-controlled Systems"

  

December 2021

The new project "BNTrAinee: Bonn Transdisciplinary Education in Artificial Intelligence" is funded by BMBF. [Press release]

October 2021

Our team NimbRo was ranked first in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Semifinals, which took place in September 2021 in Miami, Florida. [Press Release]

September 2021

The new German-French Project "Learn2Grasp: Learning Human-like Interactive Grasping based on Visual and Haptic Feedback" is funded by BMBF and ANR. [Press Relase]

August 2021

The new project "Transferzentrum RimA – Roboter im Alltag (Robots in Everyday Life)" is funded by BMBF. Our subproject focusses on benchmarking of assistance robots in everydeay environments. [Press Release]

April 2021

Diego Rodriguez successfully defended his PhD thesis "Learning Grasping and Walking Motion Generation for Humanoid Robots"

December 2020

Two new projects "Semantic Video Prediction (P6)" and "Anticipative Human-Robot Collaboration (P8)" are funded as part of the second phase of the DFG research unit FOR 2535 Anticipating Human Behavior.

     

November 2020

The paper Marius Beul, Simon Bultmann, Andre Rochow, Radu Alexandru Rosu, Daniel Schleich, Malte Splietker, and Sven Behnke: "Visually Guided Balloon Popping with an Autonomous MAV at MBZIRC 2020" received the Best Paper Award at the  IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Philipp Allgeuer successfully defended his PhD thesis "Analytic Bipedal Walking with Fused Angles and Corrective Actions in the Tilt Phase Space".

October 2020

A new project "Collaborative Perception and Prediction with Smart Edge Sensors" is funded by Fraunhofer IAIS.

August 2020

David Droeschel sucessfully defended his PhD thesis "Efficient Methods for Lidar-based Mapping and Localization".

June 2020

Our proposal for the Amazon Research Award project "Learning Structured Scene Modeling and Physics-Based Prediction for Manipulation" was funded.

February 2020

Our team NimbRo came in second in the Grand Challenge and in the wall-building sub-challenge of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC), which took place in Abu Dhabi.

   

January 2020

Tobias Klamt successfully defended his PhD thesis: "Planning Hybrid Driving-Stepping Locomotion for Ground Robots in Challenging Environments"

 

December 2019

The Teaching Award of the Bonn Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences has been awarded to Dr. Nils Goerke.

October 2019

Matthias Nieuwenhuisen successfully defended his PhD thesis: "Planning and Navigation in Dynamic Environments for Mobile Robots and Micro Aerial Vehicles"

 

July 2019

The soccer robots of our team NimbRo won all competitions of Humanoid League AdultSize class at RoboCup 2019 in Sydney, Australia: 2 vs. 2 soccer tournament, 2 vs. 2 drop-in games, technical challenges, Best-humanoid Award.

  

May 2019

The CENTAURO project was awarded the Ralf-Dahrendorf-Preis by the German Minister of Education and Research (BMBF). BMBF will fund a project to communicate the CENTAURO results to high-school students. [Press release]

     (c) Bernd Lammel, Bildkraftwerk

March 2019

The Google Faculty Research Award project "Collaborative Perception using Smart Edge Sensors and Cloud-based 4D SLAM" was funded.

January 2019

Our proposal for the Amazon Research Award project "Generalizing Scene Parsing for Cluttered Bin Picking" was funded.

October 2018

The final integrated CENTAURO system was evaluated for multiple complex locomotion and manipulation tasks in disaster-response scenarios at the Kerntechnische Hilfsdienst GmbH near Karlsruhe.

 

A new project to develop autonomous assistance functions for micro aerial vehicles has been granted by BMBF as part of the competence center for rescue robots (DRZ). [More information]

June 2018

The soccer robots of our team NimbRo won all competitions of Humanoid League AdultSize class at RoboCup 2018 in Montreal, Canada: 1 vs. 1 soccer tournament, 2 vs. 2 drop-in games, technical challenges, Best-humanoid Award.

February 2018

Our lab moved to the new Computer Science building (Informatikzentrum) on Campus Poppelsdorf.

Our proposal for the Amazon Research Award project "Learning Scene Parsing for Cluttered Bin Picking" was funded.

November 2017

The first integrated CENTAURO system was evaluated for multiple locomotion and manipulation tasks at the Kerntechnische Hilfsdienst GmbH near Karlsruhe.

   

September 2017

The kickoff workshop for the cooperative project "Development of the artificial electronic skin that mimics human skin structure and functions for tactile and kinesthetic feedback in robotic surgery or prosthetic arms" with Korean partners, which is coordinated by the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), took place in Bonn.

The paper Hafez Farazi and Sven Behnke: "Online Visual Robot Tracking and Identification using Deep LSTM Networks"  received the IROS 2017 RoboCup Best Paper Award at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Vancouver, Canada.
The paper Tobias Klamt and Sven Behnke: "Anytime Hybrid Driving-Stepping Locomotion Planning" was Finalist for the Best Paper Award on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics.

 

July 2017

Our team NimbRo was very successful at RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, Japan. Our Humanoid TeenSize and AdultSize soccer robots won their tournaments, technical challenges, drop-in challenge and the RoboCup Design Award. In the Amazon Robotics Challenge, our team NimbRo Picking won the 2nd price in the Pick task and came in second in the Final Stow and Pick task. 
[More information on the soccer robots]   [More information on the bin picking robots]

    

May 2017

Dirk Holz successfully defended his PhD thesis: "Efficient 3D Segmentation, Registration and Mapping for Mobile Robots".

March 2017

Our team NimbRo won the Grand Challenge and Challenge 2 in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC), which was organized by Khalifa University and took place in Abu Dhabi.

[More information]

December 2016

The Research Unit FOR 2535 "Anticipating Human Behaviour" will be funded by German Research Foundation (DFG). Six groups of the Bonn Computer Science Institute will together develop methods for modelling and prediction of human behavior and for using the predictions for anticipative human-robot collaboration. In the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group, “Learning Hierarchical Representations for Anticipative Human-Robot Collaboration” will be investigated.

September 2016

Hannes Schulz successfully defended his PhD thesis: "Learning Object Recognition and Object Class Segmentation with Deep Neural Networks on GPU"

 

July 2016

The paper Nicola Krombach, David Droeschel, and Sven Behnke: "Combining Feature-based and Direct Methods for Semi-dense Real-time Stereo Visual Odometry" received the Best Paper Award at the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) in Shanghai, China. 

Our team NimbRo won at RoboCup 2016 the Humanoid TeenSize soccer competition and the igus Humanoid Open Platform robot received the first Harting International Open-Source Award. In the Amazon Picking Challenge, our team came in 2nd in the Stowing task and 3rd in the Picking task.

       

February 2016

Marcell Missura successfully defended his PhD thesis "Analytic and Learned Footstep Control for Robust Bipedal Walking"

November 2015

Our team NimbRo Explorer solved through the mobile manipulation robot Momaro all tasks at the DLR SpaceBot Camp.

     [Video]

October 2015

Katrin Gräve successfully defended her PhD thesis "Lernen komplexer Aufgaben aus Demonstration und eigener Erfahrung".

July 2015

The igus® Humanoid Open Platform robot, which we develop together with igus® GmbH, won the first RoboCup Design Award at the RoboCup 2015 Competition in Hefei, China.

    

June 2015

Our team NimbRo Rescue was the best ranked European Team at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals in Pomona, CA, coming in 4th in the overall ranking.

    

May 2015

Our teams NimbRo Manufacturing, NimbRo Logistics, and NimbRo Copter have been admitted to Stage II of the European Robotics Challenges (EuRoC). Together with industrial end-users, they will address use cases in the domain "Factories of the Future".

March 2015

Jörg Stückler received the 2015 Georges Giralt PhD Award for his thesis “Efficient Dense Registration, Segmentation, and Modeling Methods for RGB-D Environment Perception” at the European Robotics Forum in Vienna.

 

Our team NimbRo Rescue is qualified to participate at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals.

     

December 2014

The Grant Agreement 644839 for the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action "CENTAURO – Robust Mobility and Dexterous Manipulation in Disaster Response by Fullbody Telepresence in a Centaur-like Robot" has been signed. University of Bonn is the coordinator. Partners are: Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (Italy), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Linköping University (Sweden), RWTH Aachen University, progenoX GmbH, and Kerntechnische Hilfsdienst GmbH. The project is funded in call ICT-23-2014 Robotics, will start on April 1st, 2015, and has a duration of 42 months. [Press release]

Two Master theses from our group have been awarded the BIG Masterarbeitspreis of the Bonner Informatik Gesellschaft e.V.:
Manus McElhone "Model, Match, Vote and Track: 6-DoF Pose Filtering with Multi-resolution Surfel Maps" and
Benedikt Waldvogel "Accelerating Random Forests on CPUs and GPUs for Object-Class Image Segmentation".

Our team NimbRo Explorer is supported by the German Aerospace Center to participate at the DLR SpaceBot Cup 2015.

Our teams NimbRo Manufacturing, NimbRo Logistics, and NimbRo Copter qualified in all three challenges of the European Robotics Challenges Simulation Contest.

November 2014

The DFG Research Unit FOR 1505 "Mapping on Demand" has been extended for a second fundign period of three more years. Our group will work on the projects P2 "Local Perception for the Autonomous Navigation of Multicopters" and P3 "Autonomous Navigation for Object Capture with Multicopters".

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) will organize the SpaceBot Cup 2015. Our team NimbRo Explorer will receive support to participate.

October 2014

Our NimbRo soccer team was honored by the federal state of North-Rhine-Westphalia as "Germany at its Best". Award certificate.

September 2014

Jörg Stückler successfully defended his PhD thesis "Efficient Dense Registration, Segmentation, and Modeling Methods for RGB-D Environment Perception". Winner of 2015 Georges Giralt PhD Award.

German Research Foundation (DFG) granted the extension of the project "Autonomous Learning of Bipedal Walking Stabilization" for three more years.

German Research Foundation (DFG) granted the new project "ALROMA - Autonomous Active Object Learning Through Robot Manipulation" in its priority programme SPP 1527 "Autonomous Learning".

August 2014

Andreas C. Müller successfully defended his PhD thesis "Methods for Learning Structured Prediction in Semantic Segmentation of Natural Images".

July 2014

Our teams NimbRo TeenSize and NimbRo@Home participated in the RoboCup 2014 competition in Joao Pessoa, Brasil.
The soccer robots came in second th the tournament and won the technical challenge. The domestic serrvice robots reached the third place in the @Home league. The paper by Marcell Missura and Sven Behnke "Balanced Walking with Capture Steps" won the Best Science Paper Award at the 18th International RoboCup Symposium.

 

April 2014

A 3D printed humanoid robot that we are developing in a DFG transfer project together with igus GmbH is presented at Hannover Messe. Press release.

 More information...

Our team NimbRo won the @Home league competition of the service robots at RoboCup German Open in Magdeburg. Press release.

    More information...

January 2014

A new project has started: InventAIRy - Identification with Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles. It is funded in the national BMWi program Autonomics for Industry 4.0. Our group will develop perception and planning methods for autonomous navigation in indoor and outdoor warehouses. Partners are Fraunhofer IML (coordinator), Aibotix GmbH, Panopa Logistik GmbH, and Wiedmann GmbH.

November 2013

Our Explorer robot demonstrates mobile manipulation in rough terrain at the DLR SpaceBot Cup. More info...

October 2013

A new EU FP7 research project starts in our group: STAMINA - Sustainable and reliable robotics for part handling in manufacturing automation.
Partners are: Aalborg University (Coordinator), Denmark, Peugot Citroen Automobiles S.A., France, BA Systemes SAS, France, University of  Freiburg, Germany, INESC Porto, Portugal, and University of Edinburgh, UK.
 

July 2013

The Humanoid Soccer School 2013 took place in Bonn, organized by Jacky Baltes and Sven Behnke.

June 2013 

Our team NimbRo won both the Humanoid TeenSize Soccer competition and the @Home League competition of the service robots at RoboCup 2013 in Eindhoven.
In the Humanoid TeenSize class, our soccer robots won in the final 4:0 vs. CIT-Brains from Japan. More info...
In the @Home League, our cognitive service robot Cosero showed its skills in navigation, object manipulation, tool use, and human-robot interaction. More info...

April 2013

Our team NimbRo@Home won the competition for service robots at RoboCup German Open 2013.
Our Humanoid TeenSize Open Platform  NimbRo-OP received the HARTING Open-Source Award.
More on @Home; more on NimbRo-OP.

March 2013

Kickoff meeting for the DLR SpaceBot Cup in Berlin. In total ten teams are qualified. More information about our entry NimbRo Centauro.

January 2013

Our group receives support from DLR to participate at the DLR SpaceBot Cup. The tasks in this challenge are autonomous exploration and mobile manipulation in rough terrain. 

November 2012

In Düsseldorf, the NRW Young Scientist Award 2012 in the category Applied Informatics has been conferred by the B-IT Research School to Nenad Biresev for his publication with Jörg Stückler and Sven Behnke: "Semantic Mapping Using Object-Class Segmentation of RGB-D Images", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS). 

 

October 2012

Our new NimbRo-OP Humanoid TeenSize Open Platform robot is shown at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Vilamoura, Portugal. 

    [Video] More info.

July 2012

Three diploma theses that were supervised in our group received an Diploma thesis award from Bonner Informatik Gesellschaft (BIG e.V.):
- Andreas Schmitz: "Hierarchische Schrittplanung für humanoide Fußballroboter (Hierarchical step planning for humanoid soccer robots)", 
- Torsten Fiolka: "Entropiebasierte interessante Regionen in 3D Punktwolken (Entropy-based interest regions in 3D point clouds)", and 
- Bastian Oehler: "Extraktion geometrischer Formprimitive mit Textur- und Reliefkarten aus 3D Punktwolken mit Farbinformation (Extraction of geometric primitives with texture and bump maps from 3D point coulds with color information)". 

June 2012

Our team NimbRo won both the Humanoid TeenSize competition and technical challenge as well as the @Home League competition at RoboCup 2012, which took place in Mexico City. In addition, our soccer robots received the Louis Vuitton Best Humanoid Award.
The paper J. J. Alcaraz-Jiménez, M. Missura, H. Martínez-Barberá, and S. Behnke: Lateral Disturbance Rejection for the Nao Robot received the Best Paper Award of the RoboCup Symposium 2012.

         [Soccer Video] [@Home Video]

April 2012

Our cognitive service robots won the RoboCup German Open 2012 @Home league competition in Magdeburg.

       [Video]   More info ...

January 2012

Three new research projects start, which are funded by German Research Foundation (DFG):
The project "Autonomous Learning of Bipedal Walking Stabilization" is part of the Priority Programme SPP 1527 "Autonomes Lernen".
The projects "Lokale Wahrnehmung für die Navigation leichter Fluggeräte" (local perception for the navigation of lightweight drones) and "3D-Navigation und Hindernisvermeidung für leichte Fluggeräte" (3D navigation and obstacle avaoidance for lightweight drones) are part of the  Research Unit FOR 1505 "Mapping on Demand".

November 2011

Our group participates in the European Robotics Week – 28 November – 4 December 2011. Our event: Prof. Oussama Khatib will give a talk on human-friendly robotics.

July 2011

Our Team NimbRo won both the Humanoid TeenSize competition and technical challenge and the competition in the @Home League at RoboCup 2011, which took place in Istanbul. The paper Jörg Stückler and Sven Behnke: "Compliant Task-Space Control with Back-Drivable Servo Actuators" received the Best Paper Award at the RoboCup Symposium 2011. more info ...

    [@Home Video] [Soccer Video]

April 2011

Our team NimbRo won the @Home League competition at  RoboCup German Open in Magdeburg. In the Standard Platform League (SPL) we reached the second place.

    more info ...

March 2011

We moved. Our new address is: Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 144, 1st floor.

February 2011

A new research project started. The experiment ActReMa - Active Recognition and Manipulation of Simple Parts Exploiting 3D Information - is funded by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission as part of Call 2 of the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development (ECHORD). Partners are the Computer Graphics Group of the Institute of Computer Science II in Bonn and Metronom Automation GmbH, Mainz.

June 2010

Our team won the Humanoid TeenSize soccer tournament at the RoboCup 2010 competition in Singapore, was elected "Best Humanoid", and reached the second place in the @Home League. More info ...

    [@Home Video] [TeenSize Video]

May 2010

Our domestic service robot Dynamaid participated at the ICRA Mobile Manipulation Challenge in Anchorage, Alaska. More info ...

  [Video]

April 2010

Our team participated at the RoboCup German Open competition in Magdeburg in the @Home League and in the Standard Platform League (SPL). In both leagues, our robots reached the second place. Our TeenSize humanoid soccer robots showed their skills in demonstrations. More info... 

    

[Soccer Video] [@Home Video]

January 2010

Our communication robot Robotinho is tested in the Deutsches Museum Bonn. As a tour guide, it explains three of our robots and three permanent exhibits. [Video]

   

July 2009

Our humanoid soccer robot Dynaped (Team NimbRo) won the RoboCup 2009 TeenSize Dribble-and-Kick tournament in Graz, Austria. Dynaped also won the TeenSize Technical Challenges. In the @Home league, our Robots Dynamaid and Robotinho came in third. They also won the innovation award for "Innovative robot body design, empathic behaviors, and robot-robot cooperation". More info...

       @Home video:    Soccer video:  

April 2009

Our humanoid soccer robots (Team NimbRo) won the RoboCup German Open competition.
We also participated in the @Home league, where we came in second.

    Soccer video:    @Home video:

March 2009

We receive two "Personal Supercomputers" for our Computational Intelligence Lab. 
They are equipped with 4x GTX295 cards each. The 8 GPUs per box have a total of 1.920 compute cores.

February 2009

Our humanoid soccer robots will be demonstrated at B-IT during the university open house for high school students and Schüler-Krypto.

January 2009

Our KidSize 2006 humanoid soccer robot Paul will be displayed in the science train (Wissenschaftszug) that will travel though Germany.

December 2008

Our group joins the European Robotics Research Network EURON.

October 2008

Our soccer robots are demonstrated at the institute party in the Faculty Club.

July 2008

Our soccer team NimbRo won the Humanoid League KidSize soccer tournament of RoboCup 2008, which took place in Suzhou, China.
      Video: 

April 2008

Our soccer team NimbRo won the humanoid league competitions of RoboCup German Open 2008, which took place at Hannover Messe.
                    Video: