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

The Robotics Innovation Center team benefits from interdisciplinary cooperation: computer scientists and design engineers meet biologists, mathematicians, computer linguists, industrial designers, electro engineers, physicists, and psychologists in order to jointly develop mobile robot systems. The design accords to latest mechatronic developments and programming based on complex, massive-parallel embedded systems 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.

In 2011, a branch office of the Robotics Innovation Center at the University of Osnabrück was opened under the direction of Prof. Dr. Joachim Hertzberg. With the application focus on agriculture, Osnabrück scientists developed algorithms for the plan-based control of autonomous robots. Due to the strong growth of the Bremen research department as well as the intensification of cooperation with the state of Lower Saxony, the research group forms the DFKI Laboratory Niedersachsen together with two other newly founded research groups at the Universities of Osnabrück and Oldenburg since April 2019.