Lab Course Humanoid Robots
Robots are versatile systems, that provide vast opportunities for active research and various operations. Humanoid robots, for example, have a human-like body, and thus can act in environments designed for humans. They are able to, e.g., climb stairs, walk through cluttered environments, and open doors. Mobile robots with a wheeled base are designed to operate on flat grounds to perform, e.g., cleaning and service tasks. Robotic arms are able to grasp and manipulate objects.
Participants will work in group of 2 or 3 on one of the possible topics.
At the end of the semester each group will give a presentation and demonstration of their project accompanied by oral moderation. The whole presentation should be approximately 10 minutes long. Every member of the group should present his/her part in the development of the system in a few sentences/slides. When the presentation is complete, each group will be asked a few questions by the HRL staff members or preferably the other students. Everyone is required to be present and to watch the presentation of the other groups.
Aside from the final demonstration, every group is required to submit a lab report. The summary should be 7 pages long (incl. images and references). The report is due on the morning before the demonstration. Please describe the task you had to solve, in what ways you approached the solution, what parts your system consists of, special difficulties you may have encountered, and how to compile and use your software. Please include a sufficient number of illustrations. Apart from the content, there are no formal requirements to this document. It is sufficient to submit one lab report per group, it must be pushed to the group's git repository before the lab presentation.
The grade of the lab will depend on the final presentation and how well the assigned task was solved (30/70).
Participants are expected to have Ubuntu Linux installed on their personal computers. The specific requirements for each project are quoted below.
The mandatory Introductory Meeting take place in person (see important dates below).
Semester:
SSYear:
2026Course Number:
MA-INF 4214, MA-MORO-E06Links:
BasisCourse Start Date:
15.04.2026Course End Date:
30.09.2026ECTS:
9Responsible HRL Lecturers:
Important dates:
All interested students have to attend the Introductory Meeting. In the Introductory Meeting, we will present the projects, the schedule, the registration process, and answer your questions.
| 15.04.2026, Wednesday, 10:00-11:00hs (room 2.025) | Introductory Meeting (mandatory) [presentation slides] |
| 19.04.2026, Sunday | Registration deadline and topic selection on our website |
| 26.04.2026, Sunday | Registration deadline in BASIS |
25.06.2026, Thursday, 10:00-12:00hs (room 2.044) | Midterm lab presentation |
| 24.09.2026, Thursday, 10:00-13:00hs (room 2.044) | Lab demonstration and deadline for lab documentation |
After the Introductory Meeting, each participant arranges an individual schedule with the respective supervisor.
Registration
The registration is now open, register HERE
Please note that we only consider registrations after 15.04.2026 12:00 pm. If you registered before, please consider registering again.
Report and presentation template
Please use the following template for the written summary. The summary should be 7 pages long (incl. images and references).
[Report template]
Please use the following template for midterm and final presentation:
[Presentation template]
Projects:
The following projects are available:
Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation
Supervisor: Rohit Menon
Teach a mobile robot to understand everyday language and act in the real world—turning “bring me the red cup” into perception, planning, and execution.
Build an end-to-end, robot-agnostic pipeline from 3D scene understanding to autonomous manipulation on a Toyota HSR.
Project Description: PDF
Find the viewpoint!
Supervisor: Sicong Pan
The task is to find the viewpoint of the given RGB image within the context of an eye-in-hand tabletop configuration.
Robot navigation using VLM
Supervisor: Xuying Huang
This project aims to use a vision language model (VLM) to achieve robot navigation. The robot should be able to understand spoken instructions , process the command using the VLM, and convert it into specific actions (such as moving to the kitchen).
Rearrangement tasks using generative policies
Supervisor: Ahmed Shokry
This project aims to use recent advances in generative models and imitation learning to train a multimodal policy capable of performing rearrangement tasks using human demonstration data.
Human-in-the-Loop Object Inspection and Grasping with a Quadruped Robot
Supervisor: Niklas Mueller-Goldingen
This project aims to develop an end-to-end human-in-the-loop system for a quadruped mobile manipulator that can autonomously navigate to a target location, let the user select a tabletop object through a GUI, reconstruct the object from multi-view RGB-D observations, and then grasp it. It will first be validated in Isaac Sim and then deployed and evaluated on the real robot platform.
Supermarket Robot
Supervisor: Benno Wingender
This projects aims to develop a shopping robot, where to robot is provided a shopping list and needs to determine how and which objects to grasp to add to the shopping basket.
Deployment will first be conducted in IsaacSim and then on the real robot.
Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Supervisor: Shahram Khorshidi
This projects aims to enable the G1 humanoid robot to perform simultaneous locomotion and manipulation tasks by LMPC (Linear Model Predictive Control) for walking pattern generation and Whole-Body Control (WBC) for motion realization and task coordination.