German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics

The Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics is a research institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) at Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, not a company. It grew out of DLR's work on space teleoperation and six-axis input devices in the late 1970s (the SpaceMouse control ball was patented in 1982), flew the ROTEX robot experiment on the Space Shuttle in 1993 and built its first impedance-controlled lightweight arm, LBR I, in 1995. The third generation LBR was licensed to KUKA in 2004 and became the basis of KUKA's LBR line. Gerd Hirzinger led the institute for decades; Alin Albu-Schäffer took over in 2012. Its new building, occupied in 2015 and 2016, is sized for 300 staff and 80 students.

Its humanoids are research platforms and have never been products. Work on Justin began in 2006 and the wheeled Rollin' Justin was shown at Automatica in 2008. TORO, a 1.74 m, 76 kg biped with 39 degrees of freedom and torque sensors in almost every joint, was first presented in 2013 and is used for walking, balancing and multi-contact control research.

The institute's main industrial impact has been through licences and spin-offs: it lists 14 to 15, including Agile Robots, founded in 2018 by former DLR staff, and Roboception.