PhD Positions in Humanoid Robotics, Vision-Language Reasoning, and Multi-Robot Active Perception at the University of Bonn University of Bonn in Germany

The Humanoid Robots Lab at the University of Bonn is advertising three fully funded PhD positions for highly motivated and qualified candidates to start as soon as possible.

The positions are supervised by Maren Bennewitz and focus on cutting-edge research in robotics, computer science, agricultural robotics, vision-language reasoning, active perception, and mobile manipulation.

Research topics:

• VLM-Based Reasoning and Robotic Intervention in Greenhouses — human-in-the-loop greenhouse robots combining 3D crop perception, vision-language reasoning, and safe physical interventions such as inspection, leaf manipulation, and selective harvesting.

• Multi-Robot Active Perception for Large-Scale Crop Mapping — collaborative active perception and planning for heterogeneous teams of UAVs, quadruped robots, and ground robots for crop mapping and monitoring.

• Uncertainty-Aware Active Perception and Mobile Manipulation — task-oriented perception and manipulation methods that propagate uncertainty from belief space to action space for cluttered and dynamic environments.

Funding: The positions are fully funded according to TV-L E13 (100%) and include access to advanced robotic platforms and infrastructure such as humanoids, quadrupeds, mobile manipulators, UAVs, VR systems, motion-capture facilities, and high-performance computing resources.

Eligibility highlights: Applicants should hold a completed Master’s degree in computer science, robotics, artificial intelligence, or a closely related field. Strong research experience in relevant areas such as active perception, robot planning, multi-robot systems, 3D reconstruction, semantic mapping, vision-language models, robot learning, or agricultural robotics is preferred. Excellent programming skills, experience with real robots, deep learning frameworks, robot simulation, 3D sensing, and very good English communication skills are expected.

Application window: The deadline is 2026-07-05. Applicants must submit an online application with a single PDF containing a CV, motivation letter, transcripts, thesis/paper links, links to online profiles if available, and contact details for two referees.