Papers
142
Total Citations
8,315
H-Index
34
About
Maren Bennewitz is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans mobile robot navigation, human-robot interaction, multi-robot coordination, and humanoid robotics. She is perhaps best known as a key contributor to OctoMap, a landmark probabilistic 3D mapping framework based on octrees that has become a foundational tool in robotics, accumulating an extraordinary 2,827 citations and achieving widespread adoption across the field. Her early career produced equally influential work through the MINERVA project, a tour-guide robot successfully deployed in a Smithsonian museum that navigated over 44 kilometers while interacting with thousands of visitors — a milestone in real-world autonomous robot deployment, reflected in over 1,200 combined citations across two seminal papers. Bennewitz also made significant contributions to multi-robot path planning, developing methods for optimizing priority schemes in decoupled coordination approaches. Her research further extends to understanding human motion patterns to enable socially compliant robot behavior, and to humanoid robotics, including whole-body model-predictive control and real-time human motion imitation. Across her career, Bennewitz has consistently bridged theoretical rigor with real-world application, producing research that remains deeply influential for students and practitioners working at the intersection of autonomous navigation, perception, and human-robot interaction.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1OctoMap: an efficient probabilistic 3D mapping framework based on octrees2,827 citations · 2013
- 2MINERVA: a second-generation museum tour-guide robot696 citations · 2003
- 3Probabilistic Algorithms and the Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Minerva521 citations · 2000
- 4Learning Motion Patterns of People for Compliant Robot Motion406 citations · 2005
- 5
- 6Whole-body model-predictive control applied to the HRP-2 humanoid228 citations · 2015
- 7Optimizing schedules for prioritized path planning of multi-robot systems192 citations · 2002
- 8Real-time imitation of human whole-body motions by humanoids167 citations · 2014
- 9Humanoid robot localization in complex indoor environments130 citations · 2010
- 10Towards a humanoid museum guide robot that interacts with multiple persons127 citations · 2006