Basic research in robotics honored

Dr. Ge Li from the research group Autonomous Learning Robots (ALR)at the KIT Department of Informatics has been honored with the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award 2026 of the Robot Institute Germany (RIG). His dissertation entitled "Unified Movement Primitives and Advanced Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Robotic Skill Learning" examines classical methods of robot learning and provides new approaches to the representation of action sequences and reinforcement learning based on action trajectories. The award was presented to him at the German Robotics Conference in Cologne in the presence of his supervisors Prof. Gerhard Neumann and Prof. Rudi Lioutikov.

With the RIG Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award, the Robotics Institute Germany recognizes dissertations that create new scientific foundations for robotics and advance the field in the long term.

"The German robotics research community has proven its strength: 27 outstanding doctoral students were nominated for the prize, which was awarded for the first time. The international selection committee had the equally challenging and gratifying task of choosing the winners and finalists from a very strong field of participants," explained Prof. Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) and responsible for this award.

The Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) is an initiative that has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) since 2024 with a total of 20 million euros over four years. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a central partner in the RIG network. A total of 14 leading universities and research institutes in Germany and over 20 associated partners belong to the RIG. The aim of the initiative is to network central robotics locations, increase international visibility, attract talent and decisively advance progress in AI-supported robotics.