Staff

DLR German Aerospace Center
Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics

 

In 2011, I joined the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, as a research scientist. Since 2016, I am coordinator of the Rollin' Justin team. In addition, I became leader of the Semantic Planning group in 2017. Since 2020 I am leader of the group for Fault-Tolerant Autonomy Architectures, which also hosts my Young Investigator Group. My current research interests include semantic state inference, fail-safe cognitive architectures, and error handling in robotic manipulation. With this I am pursuing the vision that future robots should no longer be mere tools but in fact intelligent colleagues for space and society!

---

Latest News

• [Jun 2022] The Werner-von-Siemens-Ring Foundation has accepted me as an Early Career Scientist into its network of over one hundred outstanding scientists.
• [Apr 2022] I gave a keynote at Pharmaceutical Mobile Robotics Congress in London that sparked many very interesting ideas on how to address the pandemic.
• [Feb 2022] Our paper on "Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Digital Twin Framework with Dynamic Responsibility Allocation for Complex Task Simulation" has been accepted for presentation at AAMAS 2022.
• [Jan 2022] I have been appointed to join the IEEE-RAS Women in Engineering Committee as Co-Chair. I am looking forward to serve the community on this important subject.
• [Dec 2021] Our paper on "Unsupervised symbol emergence for supervised autonomy using multi-modal latent Dirichlet allocations" has been published in the Journal of Advanced Robotics.
• [Sep 2021] A new article on "Digital Twins for Contextual Assistance During Surgical Robotics Training" has just been published Open Access in Frontiers in AI and Robotics.
• [Aug 2021] I am presenting our transfer activities from space to service robotics for care giving and laboratory automation at the Academy for Political Education together with my colleagues Jörn and Lioba.
• [May 2021] I am joining the EASE consortium as PI in the second phase of the Collaborative Research Center. My work will focus on generic mechanisms to react to external error situations.
• [Apr 2021] I am co-organizing the ERF workshop on “Telerobotics – where are we and what do we do next?”. Katharina of my group will present her work on shared autonomy for medical robotics.
• [Mar 2021] The CoViPa proposal to identify determinants of SARS-CoV-2 has been accepted for funding by the Helmholtz Association. As co-PI, I will investigate the use of robots for laboratory automation to enhance pandemic preparedness.

---

---

Awards and Honors

• 2022 Early Career Scientist, Werner-von-Siemens-Ring Foundation
• 2020 Emerging Talent Finalist, Falling Walls Foundation
• 2020 Top 10 in Tech and Engineering, Business Punk
• 2019 Young Investigator Fellowship, DLR VO-R
• 2019 MIT Innovator Under 35, Technology Review Germany
• 2019 Best Video Award, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
• 2018 Helmholtz Doctoral Prize in the Research Field Space, Helmholtz Association
• 2018 Georges Giralt PhD Award (Best European PhD Thesis in Robotics), euRobotics AISBL
• 2018 Bremen Study Award Nominee, unifreunde Bremen
• 2017 Best WBC-Paper Award Finalist, IEEE-RAS TC on Whole-Body Control
• 2017 Best WBC-Video Award Finalist, IEEE-RAS TC on Whole-Body Control
• 2016 Best Interactive Paper Award Finalist, IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots
• 2016 Robotics Fellowship, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
• 2015 Video Award Finalist, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

---

Selected Publications 

A comprehensive list of all my publications can be found in the DLR Electronic Library

Adrian S. Bauer, Anne Koepken, and Daniel Leidner, “Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Digital Twin Framework with Dynamic Responsibility Allocation for Complex Task Simulation”, in Proc. of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2022 [pdf].

Daniel Leidner “The COVID-19 Pandemic: An Accelerator for the Robotics Industry?”, IEEE
Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM), 2021 [pdf].

Peter Schmaus, Daniel Leidner, Thomas Krüger, Ralph Bayer, Benedikt Pleintinger, Andre Schiele, and Neal Y. Lii, “Knowledge driven orbit-to-ground teleoperation of a robot coworker”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 5.1, pp. 143–150, 2019 [pdf].

Daniel Leidner “Cognitive Reasoning for Compliant Robot Manipulation”, Springer Tracts in
Advanced Robotics. Springer International Publishing, 2019, Georges Giralt PhD Award (Best European PhD Thesis in Robotics), Helmholtz Doctoral Prize, MIT Technology Review Innovator under 35 Award [pdf].

Adrian Simon Bauer, Peter Birkenkampf, Alin Albu-Schäffer, and Daniel Leidner, "Inferring Semantic State Transitions during Telerobotic Manipulation", in Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 2018 [pdf].

Daniel Leidner, Georg Bartels, Wissam Bejjani, Alin Albu-Schäffer, and Michael Beetz, "Cognition-Enabled Robotic Wiping: Representation, Processing, Execution, and Interpretation", Robotics and Autonomous Systems Special Issue on Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots, 2018 [pdf].

Daniel Leidner and Michael Beetz, “Inferring the Effects of Wiping Motions based on Haptic Perception”, in Proc. of the International Conference on Humanoid Robots (ICHR), Cancun, Mexico, November 2016, pp. 461-468, Best Interactive Paper Award Finalist [pdf] [video].

Daniel Leidner, Alexander Dietrich, Michael Beetz, and Alin Albu-Schäffer, "Knowledge-Enabled Parameterization of Whole-Body Control Strategies for Compliant Service Robots", Autonomous Robots (AURO): Special Issue on Whole-Body Control of Contacts and Dynamics for Humanoid Robots, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 519-536, March 2016, Best WBC-Paper &Video Award Finalist [ PDF@Springer ].

Daniel Leidner, Alexander Dietrich, Florian Schmidt, Christoph Borst, and Alin Albu-Schäffer, “Object-Centered Hybrid Reasoning for Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation”, in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hong Kong, China, June 2014. pp. 1828-1835. [pdf] [video].

Daniel Leidner, Christoph Borst, and Gerd Hirzinger, “Things are made for what they are: Solving manipulation tasks by using functional object classes”, in Proc. of the IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Osaka, Japan, November 2012, pp. 429–435 [pdf] [video].