Maximilian Durner

Enthusiastic in the field of Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Robotics
max.durner@gmail.com

I am a researcher at the Department of Perception and Cognition at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), where I lead the Research Group Semantic Scene Analysis (SemSA). Leading this group has been an enriching experience, allowing me to grow in managing projects, guiding young researchers in their topics, and driving forward my interests in robotic perception, autonomous mobile manipulators, and object-centric perception.

News

  • March 2025 Honored to present our SemSA works at the Perceiving Unknown and Deformable Objects in Logistics and Service Robotics workshop at the European Robotics Forum (ERF).
  • March 2025 With our work "Bridging the Data Gap of Asteroid Exploration: OAISYS Extension for Synthetic Asteroid Creation", we won the Track Best Paper Award at the IEEE Aerospace Conference.
  • November 2024 Attending the euROBIN Coopetiion in Nancy, contributing with perception developed in our SemSA research group.
  • July 2024 Our RSS workshop Open-Set Robot Perception in the Wild took place in Nancy.
  • Juni 2024 In the context of the AHEAD project, we had a successful field demo at Vollkach, Germany.
  • November 2023 Honored to be one of five presenters showcasing my work at DLR RMC's institute evaluation.

Experience

Group Leader of Semantic Scene Analysis Research Group

German Aerospace Center, Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics
  • Research on semantic interpretation of robotic scenes, (object-centric) perception for manipulation in dynamic environments
  • Managing and Supervising Research Group
Juli 2022 - Present

Research Associate in Computer Vision and Machine Learning

German Aerospace Center, Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics
  • Research on class-agnostic object segmentation, scalable learning approaches for object related vision algorithms, fusion of robotic vision and manipulation
  • Implementation of algorithms and integration of visual sensors for mobile robots
May 2016 - June 2022

Teaching Assistant: Machine Learning for Computer Vision

Chair of Computer Vision & Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Munich
  • Teaching course-related exercises twice a week (~40 students)
  • Lessons focus on: bayesian statistics, classical machine learning, deep learning (theoretical and practical)
September 2019 - March 2022

Working Student

German Aerospace Center, Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics
March 2015 - March 2016
  • Master’s thesis topic: Probabilistic Graphical Model for RGB-D object recognition
  • Development of a classifier ensemble for RGB-D object recognition
  • Generation of a dataset of household objects for classification
Chair for Data Science, Technical University of Munich
April 2014 - August 2014
  • Development of an actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm for laser welding
  • Implementation of this algorithm in C
Infineon Technologies AG, Product development RF & Protection Devices
December 2013 - March 2014
  • Assembly of test setups for high-frequency sensors
  • Execution of test series
TUM Create, Prototyping & Testbedding, Singapore
August 2013 - October 2013
  • Implementation of a controller for a personalized air condition system of a fully electrical vehicle in MATLAB Simulink
  • Assistance in the prototype assembly of the vehicle

Education

Ph. D.: Computer Science

Chair of Computer Vision & Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Munich
Ongoing

Master of Science: Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

Technical University of Munich
March 2016

Bachelor of Science: Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

Technical University of Munich
September 2013

Exchange Semester

Politecnico di Torino, Italy
October 2011 ‒ June 2012
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá
August 2014 ‒ December 2014

Projects

Ongoing

  • INVERSE, WP-Lead
  • Ro-X
  • ASPIRO, WP-Lead
  • MUSERO
  • Matic-M, DLR Impulsproject
  • LUNA
  • COVIPA
  • euROBIN

Finished

Skills

Programming & Tools

Python

ROS

Linux

MacOS

Git

TeX

Pytorch

Tensorflow

Robot Platforms

AIMM

LRU2

SHERP

LWRs

Publications

Academic Services

Workshop Organizer

Supervision

  • Improving 6D Pose Estimation Accuracy of Articulated Objects by Considering Physical and Visual Plausibility, by David Risch, TUM, 2024 (Master's Thesis)
  • A Comparative Study of Classical and Learning-Based Methods for Vision-Aided Close-Proximity Asteroid Exploration, by Anibal Guerrero Hernandez, TUM, 2024 (Master's Thesis)
  • Improving Robustness of an Unknown Instance Segmentation Algorithm, by Stella Tragianni, TUM, 2023 (Master's Thesis)
  • GNNs for Knowledge Transfer in Robotic Assembly Sequence Planning, by Matan Atad, TUM, 2023 (Master's Thesis)
  • Representation Learning for Robot Keypoint Detection using Prior Kinematic Knowledge, by Leonard Klüpfel, TUM, 2022 (Master's Thesis)
  • Visual Similarity Detection Based on Latent Representations, by Kanstantsin Tkachuk, TUM, 2021 (Master's Thesis)
  • Learning a Generic Robot Representation from Motion, by Yogesh Baljeet, Saarland University, 2021 (Master's Thesis)
  • Adversarial Occlusion Augmentation: Guided Occlusion for Improving Object Detector, by Liu Siyuan, TUM, 2020 (Master's Thesis)
  • Uncertainty-Based Improvement of a Visual Classification System, by Jianxiang Feng, TUM, 2019 (Master's Thesis)
  • Vision assisted biasing for robot manipulation planning, by En Yen Puang, Universität Stuttgart, 2018 (Master's Thesis)
  • Augmented Autoencoders for Object Orientation Estimation trained on synthetic RGB Images, by Martin Sundermeyer, TUM, 2017 (Master's Thesis)

Robots and Me

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AIMM DLR

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SHERP DLR / WFP

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LRU2 DLR

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Rollin' Justin DLR

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PR2 University Bremen