Robotics research at the LSR ranges from autonomous navigation and 3D environment understanding to legged locomotion and fast dexterous manipulation.

Several hardware platforms such as the Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) robot and the Stäubli basketball robot serve as demonstrators and provide a link between theoretical research and practical implementation.

Central robotics research goals within the ACE project are, among others, robust simultaneous localization and mapping in outdoor environments, dynamic path planning and obstacle avoidance, object recognition in 3D laserrange data and people detection in vision and range data.

The main aims of the Stäubli Basketball robot project are the investigation of fast manipulation with non-negligible dynamics as well as visual and haptic sensor fusion.

More theoretical work is conducted in the area of biped walking, where legged locomotion is investigated from control-theoretic point of view. Demonstrators for this field of research are planned for the future.