We were delighted to take part in the Second German Robotics Conference, where our lab presented a broad overview of its current research activities and recent scientific contributions. The event provided an excellent platform to exchange ideas with the robotics community in Germany, engage with researchers from different domains, and showcase our latest developments in an interactive setting.

A central part of our presence at the conference consisted of four interactive sessions, each designed to give visitors hands-on insights into our work. Across these sessions, we presented our newest ideas and recent publications spanning multiple research areas, including robotics, autonomous racing, and foundation models. Rather than focusing solely on presentations, we aimed to create an open and engaging environment where attendees could interact directly with our systems, discuss methodologies, and explore the challenges of real-world deployments.

We featured interactive poster sessions on the following topics:

1. “FBGA: A Forward-Backward Method for Online Time-Optimal Velocity Planning with Generic Acceleration Constraints” by Mattia Piccinini
2. “Dynamics-Informed Vision-Language Models: An Extended Abstract on Dynamics-Aware Reasoning towards Next Generation Autonomous Systems” by Finn Rasmus Schäfer
3. “Towards Whole-Body VLA: A Scalable Data Collection Framework for Quadrupedal Mobile Manipulators” by Yuan Gao
4. “Bridging the Loco-Manipulation Disconnect: A Framework for Dynamic Whole-Body Impulse Control on Floating-Base Robots” by Roberto Brusnicki

The highlight of our participation was the keynote talk by our professor, Johannes Betz. In his talk, he provided a comprehensive overview of our research in autonomous racing, outlining both the technical challenges and the progress we have made in recent years. He also shared perspectives on how racing serves as a unique testbed for pushing the limits of autonomy, offering insights that extend far beyond the racetrack.

Overall, the conference was a great success for our lab. We greatly appreciated the many insightful conversations, the strong interest in our work, and the opportunity to connect with the wider robotics community. We look forward to continuing these discussions and collaborations in the future.