Oliver Kroemer

Oliver Kroemer is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, where he leads the Intelligent Autonomous Manipulation (IAM) Lab. His research focuses on developing algorithms and representations that enable robots to acquire versatile manipulation skills and adapt those skills to new environments over time. Kroemer’s group investigates how robots learn about objects through physical interaction, how they generalize manipulation strategies across tasks, and how reinforcement learning and tactile sensing can support robust autonomous behavior. His work spans contact modeling, motor primitives, deformable object manipulation, world modeling, and human-in-the-loop teaching. Before joining CMU, Kroemer conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Southern California and completed his PhD work at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and TU Darmstadt, where he was a finalist for the Georges Giralt Award for the best robotics dissertation in Europe. His long-term vision is a life-long learning framework for manipulation robots capable of safe, adaptive, and meaningful assistance in real-world settings.