About us

One workshop and two competitions for the 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023) are being organized by the Robotics Innovation Center (RIC), which belongs to the Bremen location of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Headed by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Frank Kirchner, scientists here develop robotic systems for complex tasks on land, under water, in the air, and in space.

The DFKI is the leading German research center in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence methods. It comprises sites in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen and Lower Saxony, as well as laboratories in Berlin and Darmstadt, and branch offices in Lübeck and Trier.

The photo shows the entrance of the building from the DFKI in Bremen.
DFKI Building in Bremen (Photo: Thomas Frank, DFKI GmbH)

The DFKI Robotics Innovation Center is a young, dynamically growing research department at the DFKI with international character. Currently, around 110 employees from all over the world work here in research and development. Up to 60 student assistants support the individual projects. The Robotics Innovation Center cooperates closely with the Robotics Group at the University of Bremen.

The team of the Robotics Innovation Center benefits from interdisciplinary collaboration: computer scientists and designers join forces with biologists, mathematicians, computational linguists, industrial designers, electrical engineers, physicists and psychologists to cooperatively develop mobile robot systems. The design corresponds to the latest mechatronic developments and the programming is based on complex, massively parallel embedded system solutions.

In the framework of direct industrial orders or publicly funded joint projects, the Robotics Innovation Center designs and realizes intelligent robots for a variety of fields of application, such as space, underwater, electric mobility, logistics, production and consumer (LPC), SAR (Search and Rescue) and security robotics, and assistance- and rehabilitation systems. The focus lies on a rapid transfer of results of basic research into real-world applications.

The DFKI Robotics Innovation Center actively supports the compatibility of family and career. An in-house childcare facility is offered for emergencies where DFKI employees’ children may be looked after by qualified kindergarten teachers in terms of a full-day care service.