Institut für Robotik und Mechatronik, DLR, Germany

DLR is the Aerospace Research Center as well as the German Space Agency. The Institute located in Oberpfaffenhofen is headed by Prof. Dr. Gerd Hirzinger and currently employs over 140 engineers and scientists. It is one of the biggest and most acknowledged Institutes in the field worldwide. The main focus is on the design and realisation of intelligent mechatronic concepts and systems. Examples of the pioneering work are multiple artificial ultra-lightweight arms and also multi-fingered hands. These robots either use force-/torque sensors at the hand, or the robot joints directly sense and control the compliance of the interactions with the environment. These technologies are successfully transferred to industrial partners as KUKA, Brainlab, and Schunk. The institute has won the EURON/erf (European Robotics Forum) Technology Transfer Award in 2004 and 2007. There is a long tradition with sensor-based robotics. First experiments demonstrated the force controlled assembly of an oil pump for a car (1981) or the ROTEX space mission (1993) with pick and place tasks of parts with bayonet fixing and the catching of a free flying object.

More recent and also awarded research is on the online processing of stereo and force/torque data, allowing Justin, the dual-arm/hand service robot, to manipulate objects on a table. The institute contributes to several international projects in FP6 (IP, Strep) as well as space projects and also to many national research projects. The institute is scientific member of  CoTeSys (COgnition for TEchnical Systems). This is part of the Initiative of Excellence, the Federal Government’s promotion.

  Team leader

Gerhard Grunwald

  Role

WP6 leader

  Main tasks

	representations and metrics attributing the grasp and path planning
	scene analysis and task reasoning
	robust grasp and path planning regarding the actual context and uncertainty of scene
	experiments and benchmarking of bimanual grasping and manipulation

Contact DLR
Dr. Gerhard Grunwald
Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics
Muenchner Straße 20
82234 Wessling, Germany
E-mail