Dirk Holz

About

Dirk Holz is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans 3D perception, autonomous mobile manipulation, and service robotics. His most influential contribution, "Real-Time Plane Segmentation Using RGB-D Cameras" (2012, 275 citations), established foundational techniques for enabling robots to rapidly interpret their environment using depth sensors — a capability critical to nearly every modern robotic application. His earlier investigation into time-of-flight cameras for 3D SLAM (2009, 120 citations) demonstrated his long-standing commitment to pushing the boundaries of robot perception. Holz has made significant strides in applied robotics, particularly in industrial and domestic settings. His work on mobile bin picking (99 citations) tackled the notoriously difficult challenge of grasping objects from unstructured piles using an anthropomorphic robot, while his depalletizing research emphasized real-world cycle-time efficiency. His contributions to the RoboCup@Home competition — including system development for autonomous domestic robots like "Johnny" — helped shape a generation of service robotics benchmarks. A memorable real-world deployment came during the 2010 Cologne archive collapse, where he reported on rescue robots operating in a genuine disaster scenario. Collectively, Holz's portfolio reflects a researcher bridging rigorous perception research with practical, deployable robotic systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Real-Time Plane Segmentation Using RGB-D Cameras

   275 citations · 2012
2. 2
   Three‐dimensional mapping with time‐of‐flight cameras

   120 citations · 2009
3. 3
   Mobile bin picking with an anthropomorphic service robot

   99 citations · 2013
4. 4
   RoboCup@Home: Analysis and results of evolving competitions for domestic and service robots

   83 citations · 2015
5. 5
   Johnny: An Autonomous Service Robot for Domestic Environments

   73 citations · 2011
6. 6
   SkiROS—A Skill-Based Robot Control Platform on Top of ROS

   69 citations · 2017
7. 7
   RoboCup@Home: Demonstrating Everyday Manipulation Skills in RoboCup@Home

   48 citations · 2012
8. 8
   Real-time object detection, localization and verification for fast robotic depalletizing

   45 citations · 2015
9. 9
   Active Recognition and Manipulation for Mobile Robot Bin Picking

   40 citations · 2013
10. 10
    Rescue robots at the Collapse of the municipal archive of Cologne City: A field report

    40 citations · 2010

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links