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Publications

Research papers and academic publications

Conference Papers

WorkBenchMark: A LEGO-Based Assembly Benchmark with an Assembly-by-Disassembly Baseline for the Smart Manufacturing League

Accepted

Wenbo Ma, Daniel Swoboda, Matteo Tschesche, Till Hofmann

RoboCup Symposium · Oral Presentation · 2026

A LEGO Duplo–based benchmark for robotic assembly, motivated by the RoboCup Smart Manufacturing League, where low-level manipulation must meet task-level symbolic reasoning under physical constraints — a combination today's end-to-end methods handle unreliably. It contributes 400 tasks across four difficulty tiers and an open-vocabulary, assembly-by-disassembly baseline whose planning-based pipeline beats a modern vision-language-action approach at every tier. The benchmark, simulator, and baseline will be released openly.

Robotic AssemblyTask and Motion PlanningPlanningBenchmarkAutonomous Robotics

Making Robots Play by the Rules: The ROS 2 CLIPS-Executive

Published

Tarik Viehmann, Daniel Swoboda, Samridhi Kalra, Himanshu Grover, Gerhard Lakemeyer

18th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART) · 2026

Brings CLIPS — a rule-based language well suited to knowledge-driven robot coordination — into the ROS 2 ecosystem as a CLIPS-Executive, building on the original from the Fawkes framework. Its flexibility is shown by layering a PDDL-based planning framework on top.

CLIPSROS 2rule-based reasoningrobot executivePDDL
PDF arXiv DOI Code

From Production Logistics to Smart Manufacturing: The Vision for a New RoboCup Industrial League

Published

Supun Dissanayaka, Alexander Ferrein, Till Hofmann, Kosuke Nakajima, Mario Sanz-Lopez, Jesus Savage, Daniel Swoboda, Matteo Tschesche, Wataru Uemura, Tarik Viehmann, Shohei Yasuda

2025 RoboCup Symposium, Salvador, Bahia · 2025

Sets out the vision for the RoboCup Smart Manufacturing League, successor to the Logistics League. It widens the competition from production logistics into a full modern-factory scenario built from initially independent tracks — assembly, human-robot collaboration, humanoid robotics — that gradually merge, keeping the league relevant to current industrial-robotics challenges and welcoming to both newcomers and veteran teams.

RoboCupsmart manufacturingindustrial roboticscompetition design
PDF arXiv

CAD-Based Product Partitioning for Automated Disassembly Sequence Planning with Community Detection

Published

Soren Munker, Daniel Swoboda, Karim El Zaatari, Nehel Malhotra, Lucas Manasses Pinheiro de Souza, Amon Goppert, Chi-Guhn Lee, Robert H Schmitt

Proceedings of the Changeable, Agile, Reconfigurable and Virtual Production Conference · 2023

Addresses disassembly sequence planning for sustainable remanufacturing, such as recovering lithium-ion cells from automotive battery packs. A CAD-based method partitions a product using community detection to derive disassembly sequences with fewer steps, helping make remanufacturing scalable.

disassembly planningCADcommunity detectionsustainabilityremanufacturing
PDF

Workshop Papers

Towards Using Promises for Multi-Agent Cooperation in Goal Reasoning

Published

Daniel Swoboda, Till Hofmann, Tarik Viehmann, Gerhard Lakemeyer

2022 Workshop on Planning and Robotics · 2022

Extends a goal-reasoning framework so cooperating mobile robots share not just their world models but their intentions, through 'promises' that certain facts will hold at some future point. Promises fit into the goal life cycle and map onto PDDL timed initial literals for planning, and are evaluated in a simplified logistics scenario.

multi-agent systemsgoal reasoningcooperationplanningrobotics
PDF arXiv

Technical Reports & Other

The Carologistics RoboCup Logistics Team 2023

Published

Daniel Swoboda, Tarik Viehmann, Matteo Tschesche, Alexander Ferrein, Gerhard Lakemeyer

RoboCup Logistics League — Team Description Paper · 2023

Team description paper for Carologistics, the joint RWTH/FH Aachen RoboCup Logistics League team, summarising its centralised goal-reasoning agent, multi-agent coordination, and ROS-based software stack for the production-logistics scenario.

RoboCupgoal reasoningmulti-agent coordinationlogistics robots

Theses

Jointly Learning Skill Execution and Domain Grounding for Robot Task and Motion Planning

Master's Thesis

Daniel Maximilian Swoboda

Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University · 2024

Integrates task planning with imitation learning for robotic manipulation in cluttered, dynamic environments, jointly learning skill execution and the symbolic grounding that ties perception to a planning domain — so a robot can both reason about and carry out long-horizon tasks.

task and motion planningimitation learningroboticstransformermanipulation
PDF

Sharing Promises and Requests in Multi-Agent Goal Reasoning for Logistics Robots

Bachelor's Thesis

Daniel M Swoboda, Till Hofmann, Gerhard Lakemeyer, Matthias Jarke

Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University · 2020

Develops mechanisms for logistics robots to share promises and requests within a multi-agent goal-reasoning framework, letting agents coordinate by communicating intended future world states — groundwork for the later 'promises' line of research.

multi-agent systemsgoal reasoninglogistics robotsRoboCupIndustry 4.0
PDF

Invited Talks

General Policies, Planning, and Robotics

Plenary Talk

1st Mexican Conference on Intelligent Robotics (MEXCIR) · Mexico · June 2025

Explored how to bridge learning (fast, adaptive System 1) and reasoning (deliberate, structured System 2) in robotics to achieve reliable, transparent, and generalisable goal-directed behaviour. The unifying idea: use general policies to improve planning and execution across different robotics domains.

Building a Robotics Software Stack

Invited Talk

compAIR Competition · Online · April 2021

Invited presentation on developing comprehensive robotics software architectures, covering best practices for building scalable and maintainable robotics systems.