MPI-IS Researchers Participate in the 2nd German Robotics Conference (GRC 2026)

The three-day event featured an extensive scientific and community program, including over 45 demonstrations, 241 extended abstracts presented as 221 posters and 20 short talks, nine workshops, and eight keynotes, supported by 24 sponsors. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) were well represented, with 11 participants contributing to workshops, talks, panels, and award activities.

Among the highlights was a workshop organized by our research group leader Florian Hartmann as part of the Novel Bodyware cluster of RIG. The workshop, titled “Soft Robotics: New Bodies for Future Robots,” explored soft materials, actuation, and morphology for next-generation robotic systems. The workshop featured contributions from our group leaders Buse Aktaș and Antonia Georgopoulou, who participated as invited speakers. Another group leader, Philipp Müller, presented a poster titled “The MultiMediate Challenge: Generalisable Engagement Estimation in Human-Human and Human-Robot Interactions”.

Doctoral researchers from MPI-IS also contributed to the technical program. Iris Andrussow presented a short talk titled “Minsound: Adding Internal Audio Sensing to Internal Vision Enables Human-Like In-Hand Fabric Recognition with Soft Robotic Fingertips” and a poster titled “Learning Dexterous Manipulation with Three Independent Fingers from Human Demonstrations”. Uli Bartels and his University of Stuttgart collaborator Alexander Achberger presented a poster titled “Rendering Forces with a Modular Cable System, Motors, and Brakes” accompanied by a backpack-mounted live demonstration that allowed visitors to feel strong haptic feedback inside virtual reality. 

The event included a panel discussion on “Integrating Robotics and AI” led by Maren Bennewitz and featuring our director Katherine J. Kuchenbecker among the panelists. The discussion highlighted the importance of small, flexible research grants awarded across research groups, interdisciplinary collaboration, and co-advising doctoral researchers and postdocs across fields such as robotics, machine learning, and materials science. Katherine also pointed to programs like IMPRS-IS and IntCDC as examples of communities that successfully foster these cross-disciplinary collaborations. The importance of openly sharing code, data, and research results was emphasized, enabling others to build on and broaden the impact of robotics innovations for industry and society.

Another particularly notable moment during the conference was the visit of Dorothee Bär, Federal Minister of Research, Technology and Space of Germany, who delivered a keynote speech titled “Germany’s High-Tech Agenda and AI Robotics Booster – The Path for Germany’s Future Technologies.” During her visit, she also toured the demonstration area, engaging with researchers and exploring the latest robotics technologies presented at the conference.

The newly founded Deutsche Gesellschaft für Robotik (DGR) was also announced at the conference by Marc Toussaint (former Max Planck Fellow of MPI-IS, now at Technical University Berlin). The DGR aims to connect researchers, industry professionals, startups, and educators in robotics, fostering collaboration and representing German robotics interests nationally and internationally. Pre-registration for membership is now open at german-robotics.org. DGR will soon be electing its first board of leaders, and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker will be co-organizing the election with two other founding members of the organization.

A general meeting of the Robotics Institute Germany took place one day before the larger conference. Here, too, our institute played a leading role. Buse Aktaş and Birgül Akolpoglu presented the RIG Internship (RIGI) program, which offers paid summer internships to bachelor’s and master’s students from backgrounds that are generally under-represented in engineering and computer science. This year RIGI attracted 995 applications from 75 countries, and the institute is looking forward to welcoming 26 interns to work with 10 different faculty members in Stuttgart this summer. Professors at many other RIG institutions showed particular interest in RIGI as an important way to strengthen and diversify the pipeline of people interested in advancing robotics in German academia and industry.

This year’s conference also featured the first RIG Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award, which was organized by Katherine J. Kuchenbecker together with Birgül Akolpoglu and was presented during the RIG Heroes Award Night. The inaugural award attracted 27 nominations of doctoral researchers who graduated from 16 universities across the country, highlighting the breadth and quality of robotics research being conducted nationwide. From these nominations, Shuang Guo, Nico Höllerich, and Lennart Karstensen were selected as finalists and were honored on stage. Two other nominees were chosen as winners and had the chance to present their doctoral research on the final day of the conference: Ge Li and Pierre Schumacher. Ge Li was advised by Gerhard Neumann and Rudolf Lioutikov at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), while Pierre Schumacher was an IMPRS-IS scholar advised by Daniel Häufle and Georg Martius at the University of Tübingen. Notably, both winning dissertations were co-supervised, highlighting the scientific benefits of collaboration across laboratories and disciplines.

The award selection committee consisted of Jake Abbott, Nikolaus Correll, Kostas Daniilidis, Aaron Johnson, and Silvia Rossi, all tenured professors at universities outside Germany. They carefully reviewed the nominated dissertations and selected the finalists and winners. Amazon Deutschland sponsored monetary prizes for the winners and travel support for the finalists and winners to attend the conference.

The second German Robotics Conference once again demonstrated the strength of the Robotics Institute Germany network, which connects leading research institutions and strategic partners across the country. By bringing together researchers, industry leaders, and policymakers, GRC continues to play an important role in strengthening collaboration, advancing robotics innovation, and shaping the future of AI-powered robotics in Germany.