Christoph Weinrich

About

Christoph Weinrich is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, assistive robotics, and mobile robot perception. His research has made significant contributions to enabling robots to reliably detect, track, and understand people in real-world environments — capabilities essential for robots operating safely alongside humans. Weinrich is perhaps best known for his work on the ROREAS system, a robot coach designed to support post-stroke patients through walking and orientation rehabilitation, which has garnered 70 citations and represents a landmark application of service robotics in clinical settings. His technical contributions span monocular upper-body orientation estimation using SVM and HOG-based methods (42 citations), and robust people detection using 2D laser range data — including the challenging task of distinguishing patients using walking aids (41 citations), a problem directly motivated by rehabilitation environments. His earlier work on robot programming by demonstration through system identification (34 citations) addressed how robots can be efficiently personalized without hand-coding, an important challenge in service robotics. Additional contributions in socially compliant navigation and multi-modal people tracking further demonstrate his sustained focus on making robots contextually aware and safe companions — research that collectively underpins modern assistive and socially intelligent robotic systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   ROREAS: robot coach for walking and orientation training in clinical post-stroke rehabilitation—prototype implementation and evaluation in field trials

   70 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Estimation of human upper body orientation for mobile robotics using an SVM decision tree on monocular images

   42 citations · 2012
3. 3
   People detection and distinction of their walking aids in 2D laser range data based on generic distance-invariant features

   41 citations · 2014
4. 4
   Robot programming by demonstration through system identification

   34 citations · 2007
5. 5
   Prediction of human collision avoidance behavior by lifelong learning for socially compliant robot navigation

   20 citations · 2013
6. 6
   People Tracking on a Mobile Companion Robot

   14 citations · 2013
7. 7
   Appearance-Based 3D Upper-Body Pose Estimation and Person Re-identification on Mobile Robots

   10 citations · 2013
8. 8
   Multi-modal people tracking on a mobile companion robot

   9 citations · 2013
9. 9
   Generic Distance-Invariant Features for Detecting People with Walking Aid in 2D Laser Range Data

   9 citations · 2015
10. 10
    Programming Mobile Robots by Demonstration through System Identification.

    8 citations · 2007

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links