Technische Universität München

Dirk Wollherr is currently senior researcher and lecturer for the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering in the TUM Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. He received the diploma engineer degree in Electrical Engineering in 2000 and the Doctor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering in 2005 from the Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. From 2001-2004 he has been research assistant at the Control Systems Group, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. In 2004 he has been granted a research fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at the Yoshihiko-Nakamura-Lab, The University of Tokyo, Japan. From 2006-2008 Dr. Wollherr acted as General Manager of the Cluster of Excellence "Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys)". Since 2005, he has served as a principal investigator, independent junior research group leader, and research area leader in CoTeSys. Furthermore, he has been active in dissemination, e.g. General Chair of the German "Robotik 2008" conference and Finance Chair of RO-MAN 2008, as well as in several EU projects, e.g. Robot@CWE, CyberWalk, and Movement. His research interests include automatic control, robotics, autonomous mobile robots, human-robot-interaction, and humanoid walking.

Most Innovative Video Award of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2009 (IJCAI2009) for the video The Autonomous City Explorer

Finalist of the Best Video Award at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2009) for the video The Autonomous City Explorer Project

Admission to the ProLehre-intensiv 2006, a two year intensive course on best practice in university teaching

Research fellowship by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), 2004

More publications are available here.

A. Bauer, K. Klasing, G. Lidoris, Q. Mühlbauer, F. Rohrmüller, S. Sosnowski, T. Xu, K. Kühnlenz, D. Wollherr, M. Buss, The Autonomous City Explorer: Towards Natural Human-Robot Interaction in Urban Environments, International Journal of Social Robotics 1 (2009), no. 2, 127-140.

A. Bauer, D. Wollherr, M. Buss, Human-Robot Collaboration: A Survey, International Journal of Humanoid Robotics (IJHR) 5 (2008), no. 4, 47 - 66.

M. Buss, M. Beetz, and D. Wollherr, CoTeSys - Cognition for Technical Systems, International Journal of Assistive Robotics and Mechatronics 8 (2007), no. 4, 25-36.

D. Wollherr, Online Posture Correction for Humanoid Walking Robots, at -- Automatisierungstechnik 54 (2006), no. 8, 396-404.

D. Althoff, M. Althoff, D. Wollherr, M. Buss, Probabilistic Collision State Checker for Crowded Environments, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2010.

U. Mettin, A. S. Shiriaev, G. Bätz, D. Wollherr, Ball Dribbling with an Underactuated Continuous-Time Control Phase , Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010.

K. Klasing, D. Althoff, D. Wollherr, M. Buss, Comparison of Surface Normal Estimation Methods for Range Sensing Applications, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Kobe, Japan, 2009.

K. Klasing, D. Wollherr, M. Buss, Realtime Segmentation of Range Data Using Continuous Nearest Neighbors, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Kobe, Japan, 2009.

G. Lidoris, D. Wollherr, M. Buss, Bayesian State Estimation and Behavior Selection for Autonomous Robotic Exploration in Dynamic Environments, Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September, 22-26, Nice, France, 2008.

D. Wollherr, F. Zonfrilli, and Y. Nakamura, Active-Passive Knee Control for the Humanoid UT-Theta, Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Robotics, Seattle, Washington, USA, 2005, p. 692-697.

The vision of bringing robots into human life has been the driving force in Dirk Wollherr’s research. The long-term vision is to enable robots to act and interact on human terms in unknown and unstructured human environments. To this end, Dirk Wollherr focuses on three main research topics: First, autonomous navigation of mobile robots in densely populated environments like shopping areas, where dynamic motions of humans have to be taken into account when planning robot motions. In a second research thread, taking up findings from linguistics, a new systematically structured communication framework is being developed which mimics human communication patterns and produces natural and intuitive human-robot communication. A graph theoretic approach is used to verify plausibility of direction information and identify knowledge gaps. The third objective is to enable robots to dynamically manipulate generic objects without form closure, i.e. without firmly gripping the object. This especially involves smooth manipulation minimizing the collision impact by exploiting dynamic properties of the object and fusion of multiple sensor modalities.