In April 2026, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jens Lambrecht was appointed as the new head of the institute. Following the tradition of one of the oldest robotics chairs in Germany, the institute continues its core activities in teaching and research while establishing new thematic priorities. The focus is on human-machine interaction as well as the networking and learning of robotic systems in complex, dynamic environments. Research in the field of reinforcement learning holds a particularly prominent place, building on extensive prior work and advancing it in a targeted manner. To make this thematic realignment visible externally, the institute has been renamed the Institute of Cognitive Robotics — a name that consistently reflects the institute's self-understanding at the intersection of cognitive science, machine learning, and modern robotics.
The Institute of Robotics and Process Control is one of the oldest robotics chairs in Germany. It was founded in 1986 by Prof. em. Dr.-Ing. F. Wahl, who led it until 2014. Over the years, the institute has addressed many important fundamental and application-oriented topics in robotics, particularly sensor-based control, robot programming with manipulation primitives, industrial handling technology, human-machine collaboration, mobile robotics, and robotics in production systems. The spin-off Reflexxes has, since 2010, professionalized online trajectory generation and continues to set the commercial standard in this field to this day. The institute has also set milestones in medical robotics, for example in the robot-assisted alignment of bones and the positioning of endoscopes. A second major research area was machine vision. Through a series of industrial cooperation projects, the institute has made significant contributions to visually guided automated driving. In addition, algorithms for 3D reconstruction were developed and a successful spin-off in the field of scanner technology was established.
In October 2016, Prof. Dr. Jochen Steil was appointed as the new head of the institute. The institute's main activities then encompassed teaching and research in the areas of advanced robotics, robot learning, sensor-based manipulation, and process modeling. Relevant activities also included the integration and role of robotics in production systems, as well as more broadly in the context of Industry 4.0 and the digitalized society — in this regard, Prof. Steil advised several public committees on questions related to the future of work and robot ethics. The institute coordinated the European H2020 project "CogIMon – Cognitive Interaction in Motion" and is a member of euRobotics, the European association of robotics industry and research. It led several industrial transfer projects and cooperates with the Zukunftsallianz Maschinenbau Norddeutschland to support small and medium-sized enterprises in particular on their path toward robotics-based innovation.
