3 Open PhD Positions, University of Bonn, Germany

PhD

Open PhD Positions

The Humanoid Robots Lab At The University Of Bonn In Germany, Headed By Maren Bennewitz, Is Looking For Two Highly Motivated And Qualified PhD Students (f/m/d), To Start As Soon As Possible. The Positions Are In The Following Research Areas

• VLM-Based Reasoning and Robotic Intervention in Greenhouses: Developing human-in-the-loop greenhouse robots that combine 3D crop perception, vision-language reasoning, and safe physical interventions such as inspection, leaf manipulation, and selective harvesting.
• Uncertainty-Aware Active Perception and Mobile Manipulation: Developing task-oriented perception and manipulation methods that propagate uncertainty from belief space to action space, enabling operation in cluttered and dynamic environments.

What We Offer

• Fully funded position according to TV-L E13 (100%)
• Access to state-of-the-art robotic platforms and research infrastructure, including humanoids, quadrupeds, mobile manipulators, UAVs, VR systems, motion-capture facilities, and high-performance computing resources
• Research on real-world robotic systems in an internationally diverse team
• Collaboration in major national and international projects such as PhenoRob, Robotics Institute Germany, and the Lamarr Institute
• Opportunities to publish at leading robotics and AI conferences and journals (e.g. ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, R-AL, T-RO, etc.)
• Located in Bonn, a scenic and international city on the Rhine, home to the University of Bonn, one of Germany's Excellence Universities and a national leader in Clusters of Excellence.

What We Expect

We are looking for highly motivated academically excellent students who conduct independent research on real-world robotic systems and collaborate within interdisciplinary projects.

• completed Master’s degree in computer science, robotics, artificial intelligence, or a closely related field (a BSc. degree alone is not sufficient);
• research experience in one or more relevant areas, such as active perception, robot planning, mobile manipulation, humanoid robotics, multi-robot systems, 3D reconstruction, semantic mapping, vision-language models, robot learning, or agricultural robotics;
• excellent programming skills and experience with real robotic systems, and deep learning frameworks, robot simulation, 3D sensing, mobile robots, legged locomotion, or humanoids is highly desirable;
• very good English communication skills;

The candidates are expected to publish scientific results, contribute to ongoing projects in the lab, and support the supervision of Bachelor’s and Master’s students.

Application

Applications open until positions filled

The application process is handled exclusively through the form. Please do not contact us through other communication channels regarding your application, including requests for status updates.

If you encounter any problems submitting the form, please send an email to [email protected] containing your answers to the form questions and your application documents.

Please fill out the information below and upload one PDF file smaller than 8 MB containing your

• CV,
• Motivation Letter (max. 1 page), describing your background and relevant experience, your research interests and motivation for pursuing a PhD, and your fit to advertised positions
• Bachelor and Master transcript of records,
• Links to the PDF file of your MSc thesis and/or papers you may have written
• Links to your Github repository, personal website, linkedin page and google scholar page if any,
• Names and contact information for two reference letters

Full Name

Email Address

Date of Availability

Visa Required

Preferred Positions

Preferred Positions

VLM-Based Reasoning and Robotic Intervention in Greenhouses

Uncertainty-Aware Active Perception and Mobile Manipulation

Please select one or more positions you are interested in. Multiple selections are possible

Research Interests

Short Summary of Master's Thesis

German GPA

if you have a GPA of a different country, please use this converter: https://www.tum.de/en/studies/application/application-info-portal/grade-conversion-formula-for-grades-earned-outside-germany

Programming Experience

Please list your experience with programming languages and relevant libraries (C++, Python, PyTorch, ROS2, Isaac Sim, AI-assisted coding tools, etc.)

English Skills

English Skills

A1/A2

A2/B1

B1/B2

B2/C1

C1/C2

Please select your approximate English proficiency according to the CEFR scale. If you have a test score, choose the closest equivalent level

Other Language Skills

Published Papers

If available, link to google scholar page

Project/Robot Experience

Briefly describe how real-world robots or robotic platforms were used in your projects

GitHub Respository

Application Data

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