PhD and Collaboration

I am looking for a funded PhD position or industrial doctorate starting in 2026, in Berlin or Germany. My background combines seven years of engineering practice with current research in robotic perception and learning-based control — which I think is a genuinely useful combination for applied robotics research.

What I bring to a PhD project

On the engineering side, I have real deployment experience: four and a half years at Siemens AG working on PLC systems, machine vision, robotics integration, and a 4800 MW power plant control system. I know how industrial robotic cells are actually structured, what goes wrong in practice, and what it means to deliver something that runs reliably in a production environment. At Fraunhofer IPK, I applied this background to a research problem and produced a calibration system that is 87.5% faster and 76% more accurate than the conventional approach — not by using more data, but by selecting better data.

On the research side, I have hands-on experience building end-to-end robotic pipelines: Isaac Sim environments, ROS2 and MoveIt2 motion control, VGGT and Fast3R reconstruction, ICP and BUFFER-X registration, and PPO reinforcement learning in Isaac Lab. I know how these components interact and where the hard integration problems are.

I am a C1 speaker of both German and English, which matters for working in German research institutions and industry partnerships.

Research areas I want to work in

3D perception and reconstruction for robotic inspection and manipulation planning. Learning-based trajectory planning and viewpoint selection. Sim-to-real transfer for manipulation and scanning tasks. Data-efficient methods for robot calibration and system identification. Vision-language-action models for industrial robotic systems.

Institutions I am targeting

TU Berlin (Robotics and Biology Lab, Control Systems Group, MAR — Institut für Werkzeugmaschinen und Fabrikbetrieb). TU Munich (robotics, AI, computer vision groups). Fraunhofer IPA and IPK. NVIDIA Research, Isaac and Robotics teams. Bosch Research and Siemens Research. German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Timeline

Available from late 2026 after Master’s thesis completion after Master’s thesis submission at Fraunhofer IPK.

Contact

If you are a professor, research group leader, or industrial R&D manager and think there might be a good fit — or if you just want to discuss research ideas — I am happy to talk.

📧 taha.mousa2023@gmail.com · LinkedIn · Download CV

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