Hello, I'm Rohit.

I am a PhD Researcher at the University of Bonn (PhenoRob), supervised by Prof. Maren Bennewitz. I develop Active Perception architectures that allow robots to navigate and manipulate in the unstructured world by predicting what they cannot see.

My research is grounded in over a decade of industrial leadership. As a founding engineer at Neura Robotics, I built the AI perception stack from the ground up; previously, I led large-scale automation projects as a Senior Executive at Siemens.

By unifying Shape Completion, GNNs, and Evidential Uncertainty, I solve the "Where, What, and How" of intelligent robotic perception through a "Perceive-Predict-Plan" framework.

Rohit Menon

My Journey

My path in robotics began at SPCE, University of Mumbai, where I established a foundation in Electrical Engineering. Driven by the challenge of bridging control theory with physical machines, I moved to Germany to complete an M.Sc. in Automation and Robotics at TU Dortmund. A defining early milestone was my thesis at the DLR (German Aerospace Center), where I developed shared autonomy systems for assistive robotic hands.

Before pursuing my PhD, I spent nearly a decade in the frontline of German robotics. At DFKI’s Robotics Innovation Center, I engineered software for mobile manipulation and humanoid trajectory generation within EU-funded projects. I then joined NEURA Robotics as a Founding Engineer and Group Lead, spearheading the AI perception and manipulation teams to translate cutting-edge research into industrial-grade robotic products.

Now at the University of Bonn, I integrate this industrial rigor with academic research. My work in Predictive Active Perception aims to push the boundaries of how autonomous systems understand and interact with the unstructured world—combining decades of "field-ready" engineering with the future of predictive AI.

Latest Update

Recently, I was honored with the Best Poster Award at the IROS Workshop on Perception and Planning for Mobile Manipulation (2025) for my work on Open-Vocabulary and Semantic-Aware Reasoning. I also had two major papers on evidential multi-task learning and global view planning accepted to the IROS 2025 main track.