Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Steffen Puhlmann is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of dexterous manipulation, human grasping behavior, and tactile sensing. His research focuses on understanding how humans grasp and manipulate objects, and translating those insights into capable robotic systems. An early contribution to the field came through his systematic analysis of human grasping strategies, producing a taxonomy that categorizes behavior in ways directly applicable to robotic hand design — work that has accumulated over 25 citations. Building on this, his 2016 study of nearly 3,400 grasping trials revealed how humans exploit environmental constraints to achieve versatile, robust grasps, offering a compact representational framework for robotic transfer. Puhlmann's most-cited work, "Surprisingly Robust In-Hand Manipulation" (2021, 68 citations), demonstrated that even straightforwardly derived manipulation skills on a compliant anthropomorphic hand can generalize impressively across objects of varying shape, size, and weight — a finding with significant implications for real-world robot deployment. Complementing this, his development of a low-cost, flexible multi-taxel tactile sensor advances the ability of soft robotic systems to recognize objects through touch, addressing a critical sensing gap in compliant robotics. Across his career, Puhlmann has consistently bridged human motor behavior research and practical robotic engineering.