I am a post-doctoral researcher in Robotics and AI at the Robotics Innovation Center (RIC) of the German Research Center for Artifical Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen, Germany. As a leader of the Mechanics & Control Team at DFKI RIC, my aim is to develop dynamic robots that move through and interact with their environment with similar graze and agility as animals and human beings. To achieve this I am looking at the fundamentals of mechanisms and motion control. In mechanics, this involves investigating novel robot design principles, accompanied with a thorough understanding and rigorous mathematical modeling of geometry, kinematics, and dynamics of robotic systems. In the area of control, this includes predicting the robot’s state from incomplete and noisy sensor data, as well as planning and stabilizing dynamic movements in real environments, such as walking, running, jumping, and brachiating.
Research Topics
- Bipedal robot motion planning and control in real environments
- Understanding and modeling of contacts
- Whole-Body Model Predictive Control
- Non-linear optimization for robot control
Software
- ARC-OPT - Adaptive Robot Control using Optimization
Publications
For a complete list, please check my Google Scholar Profile
F. Stark, J. Middelberg, D. Mronga, S. Vyas, and F. Kirchner. “Benchmarking Different QP Formulations and Solvers for Dynamic Quadrupedal Walking”, 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2502.01329.
R. Kumar, M. Boukheddimi, D. Mronga, S. Kumar, and F. Kirchner. “Parallel Transmission Aware Co-Design: Enhancing Manipulator Performance Through Actuation-Space Optimization”, arXiv Preprint arXiv:2507.00644, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2507.00644.
D. Mronga, A. Bresser, F. Maas gen. Bermpohl, A. Danzglock, S. Stelter, A. Hawkin, H. G. Nguyen, M. Beetz, F. Kirchner. “MARLIN: A cloud integrated robotic solution to support intralogistics in retail”, In Robotics and Autonomous Systems, ScienceDirect, 2024.
D. Rakovitis, D. Mronga. “Gaussian Mixture Likelihood-based Adaptive MPC for Interactive Mobile Manipulators”, In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Yokohama, Japan, 2024, doi: 10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10610115.
D. Mronga, S. Kumar, F. Kirchner. “Whole-body control”, In Biologically Inspired Series-Parallel Hybrid Robots, Elsevier, chapter 9, 2024. ISBN: 978-0-323-88482-2.
D. Mronga, F. Kirchner. “The ARC-OPT Library for Whole-Body Control of Robotic Systems”, In Journal of Open Source Software, The Open Journal, volume 9, number 104, 2024.
D. Mronga, S. Kumar and F. Kirchner, “Whole-Body Control of Series-Parallel Hybrid Robots” 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022, pp. 228-234, doi: 10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811616.
M. Boukheddimi, S. Kumar, H. Peters, D. Mronga, R. Budhiraja and F. Kirchner, “Introducing RH5 Manus: A Powerful Humanoid Upper Body Design for Dynamic Movements”, 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022, pp. 01-07, doi: 10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811843.
D. Mronga, “Learning Task Constraints for Whole-Body Control of Robotic Systems”, 2022, University of Bremen, doi: 10.26092/elib/1547
D. Mronga and F. Kirchner, “Learning context-adaptive task constraints for robotic manipulation”, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 141, 2021, 103779, ISSN 0921-8890, doi: 10.1016/j.robot.2021.103779.
J. de Gea Fernández, D. Mronga, et al., “Multimodal sensor-based whole-body control for human–robot collaboration in industrial settings”, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 94, 2017, pp 102-119, ISSN 0921-8890, doi: 10.1016/j.robot.2017.04.007.
D. Mronga, T. Knobloch, J. de Gea Fernández and F. Kirchner, “A constraint-based approach for human–robot collision avoidance”, Advanced Robotics, 2020, Volume 34, Issue 5, pp 265-281, doi: 10.1080/01691864.2020.1721322
Contact
Dr.-Ing. Dennis Mronga
DFKI GmbH
Robert-Hooke-Str. 1
28359 Bremen, Germany
Phone: +49-421-17845-6560
E-Mail: dennis.mronga@dfki.de
Google Scolar
LinkedIn
Research Gate
DFKI Robotics Innovation Center