Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Hannes Sommer is a robotics researcher whose work spans quadrupedal locomotion, multi-robot systems, autonomous navigation, and probabilistic estimation — areas where his contributions have collectively garnered over 600 citations. His early landmark work on hierarchical operational space control for quadrupedal locomotion (2014, 152 citations) demonstrated how complex legged robot behaviors could be elegantly decomposed into prioritized least-squares optimization problems, a framework that has since influenced legged robotics broadly. Sommer also made significant strides in collaborative autonomous systems, co-developing an online multi-robot SLAM system for 3D LiDARs (2017, 144 citations) that enables rapid, redundant environment mapping critical for search-and-rescue operations. His research in human-robot interaction produced interaction-aware motion planning algorithms grounded in maximum entropy models, enabling socially compliant robot navigation in shared workspaces. On the estimation side, his Two-State Implicit Filter offered a principled Bayesian approach for systems lacking explicit process models, while his work on online self-calibration and automatic differentiation on differentiable manifolds provided foundational computational tools for modern robotics. Across these contributions, Sommer stands out as a versatile researcher bridging control theory, perception, and learning for real-world robotic deployment.