Research
Research
My academic work centered on one question: how to design, structure, and reason about complex robotic systems so they stay understandable - and dependable - as they grow. That took me from model-driven robot software architectures during my PhD at Bielefeld University, through model-based safety assessment and formal methods at Bosch Corporate Research, to open, embedded robotics with ROS 2 and micro-ROS.
That same systems perspective - how to structure, model, and verify complex behavior - is what carries over most directly into my current work on Physical AI and humanoid robotics at NEURA Robotics; the tools and the problems have moved on, but the way of thinking about them hasn't changed nearly as much.
Research themes
Robotics software & systems engineering
Software architectures, system composition, and engineering methods for building and maintaining complex robotic systems - from reusable motion primitives and robot behavior during my PhD to systems-engineering practice in industry.
Model-driven engineering & domain-specific languages
Using models and domain-specific languages to describe, generate, analyze, and maintain robotics software - the subject of my PhD thesis and of a widely-cited survey of the field.
Safety & formal reasoning
Model-based safety assessment, formal methods, and model checking for systems where failures have real-world consequences - generating fault trees and FMEA from system models, and making formal-verification results usable for engineers, not just tools.
Embedded & open robotics
Bringing robust software-engineering concepts to embedded and open-source robotics - system (re-)configuration and modes for ROS 2, and extending ROS 2 down to microcontrollers with micro-ROS.
Selected work
Modeling of Motion Primitive Architectures using Domain-Specific Languages
2016My PhD - how to describe and compose robot motion primitives using domain-specific languages, so complex motion-control architectures stay maintainable as they grow.
Full story →A Survey on Domain-Specific Modeling and Languages in Robotics
2016With Nico Hochgeschwender, Dennis Wigand, and Sebastian Wrede - mapped the landscape of domain-specific languages for robotics, still cited as a reference for the field.
Full story →Using Language Workbenches and Domain-Specific Languages for Safety-Critical Software Development
2018With Markus Völter and others - argued that DSL-based models are easier to validate than hand-written code, provided the risks of model transformation are controlled through architecture and verification.
Full story →A Systematic Literature Review on Counterexample Explanation
2022With Arut Prakash Kaleeswaran, Thomas Vogel, and Lars Grunske - surveyed 116 publications on making model-checking results understandable to engineers, not just formal-methods specialists.
System Modes - Digestible System (Re-)Configuration for Robotics
2021With Ralph Lange and Francisco Martín Rico - a notion of hierarchical system modes for ROS 2, for handling tasks, contingencies, and system-level errors together. Became the open-source system_modes package.
Robot Operating System (ROS): The Complete Reference - Chapter "Micro-ROS"
2023How the micro-ROS stack extends ROS 2 concepts down to microcontrollers - written with the micro-ROS team.
Full story →Industry Best Practices in Robotics Software Engineering
2022A panel report with engineers from JPL, Bosch, Waymo, and XITASO comparing how different organizations actually build robotics software - the industry counterpart to the academic work above.
Open-source & community
Some of this lives as open-source code and community infrastructure rather than papers:
ROS 2 System Modes: The open-source implementation of the system-modes concept above, for hierarchical system (re-)configuration in ROS 2.
micro-ROS: Bringing ROS 2 to microcontrollers - the project behind the book chapter above.
Robotics DSL Zoo: A community-maintained bibliography of domain-specific languages for robotics, grown out of the 2016 survey above.
I also coordinate euRobotics' Software Engineering, Systems Integration and Systems Engineering topic group - one more way this background stays active as community work, not just past publications.
The technologies have evolved considerably since I wrote any of this - but many of the underlying engineering questions are still familiar: how to structure complex robotic systems, how to make their parts work together reliably, how to reason about behavior and safety, and how to move from experimental capability to something dependable enough to ship. I'm not primarily a machine-learning researcher; the background I bring to Physical AI is robotics systems engineering.
Academic profiles
This page is a curated narrative, not a bibliography. For the complete, continuously-updated publication record and academic profiles: