Holger Urbanek

Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR)

Papers

Total Citations

196

H-Index

About

Holger Urbanek’s research lies at the intersection of robotics, human motor control, and human-robot interaction, with a focus on making robots safer, more adaptive, and more intuitive to work alongside. His most cited work, “Real-time reactive motion generation based on variable attractor dynamics and shaped velocities” (66 citations), introduces a unified framework for motion generation and reactive collision avoidance that preserves desired velocity profiles while responding seamlessly to physical disturbances—a foundational contribution to compliant and safe robot behavior. Urbanek also advanced robot safety through model-free anomaly detection (42 citations), enabling systems to identify hardware or software failures without prior models, critical for trustworthy human-robot collaboration. In robotics of human movements (36 citations) and learning from demonstration (34 citations), he developed methods for robots to acquire and reproduce rhythmic, repetitive tasks from human examples, bridging the gap between observed motion and autonomous execution. His work on the Grasp Perturbator (18 citations) offers a novel handheld device for measuring human grasp stiffness in vivo, contributing to haptics and rehabilitation. Urbanek’s research is distinguished by its practical, physically interpretable algorithms that enhance robot autonomy while prioritizing safety and human-like interaction.