Steffen Rühl studied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe (TH), focusing on cognitive systems, robotics and computer vision.
He wrote his diploma thesis with the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing (IITB), on the topic "Object Detection and Tracking by Clustering of 3D-Point-Clouds".

From October 2007 to February 2008 he held a scholarship by the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) working in the Interactive Diagnosis and Service Systems (IDS) group. Since March 2008 he is employed as member of the scientific staff. Currently his research deals with bi-manual manipulation.