Hi, I am Markus, a robotics and AI researcher at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. I am also doing my PhD at the School of Computation, Information and Technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where I serve as a Teaching Assistant for “Machine Learning in Robotics”.
My research makes it practical to teach robots by showing rather than programming. A person demonstrates a manipulation task a few times — by physically guiding the robot’s arm — and the robot learns a skill it can then refine through further demonstrations, natural language, or a click in a user interface. Under the hood I build on probabilistic movement primitives (motion models that capture not just a trajectory but the allowed variation around it) and combine them with foundation models. In our experiments, skills taught from just 2–5 demonstrations reached 90–100% success rates after interactive refinement (LOCI, IROSA) — all running locally, without cloud dependencies.
From 2023 to 2025, I served as the elected PhD Speaker for the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, representing all ~90 PhD students at the institute.
Contact
The fastest way to reach me is on LinkedIn — or by email: m.knauer@tum.de. I am based in Munich, Germany.