Welcome!

Currently, I am an academic advisor and lecturer (in German: Akademischer Rat und Privatdozent) at the University of Freiburg. Until September 2010, I had a 1-year deputyship (W3-Vertretung) of Wolfram Burgard and also finished my habilitation in November 2009. Before that, I was working as an academic advisor in the Lab for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Freiburg. In my research, I focus on probabilistic techniques in the context of mobile robotics. A main area of my research is autonomous exploration in combination with solutions to the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. I am also interested in classification and learning approaches, as well as in computer controlled cars, vision, navigation techniques, and scene analysis. See my publication list and research page for further details.

Short CV, detailed CV.

News

2011-12   I will serve in the Program Committee for ECAI 2012.
2011-10   I will serve in the Program Committee for WAFR 2012.
2011-09   I will serve as an Associate Editor ICRA 2012.
2011-09   I will serve in the Program Committee for IAS 2012.
2011-08   I will serve as an Area Chair for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2012.
2011-06   4 out of 4 IROS'11 papers got accepted.
2011-06   Our EU project First-MM has been reviewed successfully.
2011-05   Our EU project EUROPA has been reviewed successfully.
2010-11   Our SFB/TR-8 will be funded for another four years by the DFG!
2010-11   I will be Program Chair for Spatial Cognition (SC) 2012.
2010-09   I will be the Workshop Chair for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2011 held at USC in L.A.
2010-07   I have been selected as a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow (press release).
2010-04   Our SLAM back-end HOG-Man has been released under L-GPL.
2010-02   Our new EU project First-MM just started.
2009-11   I successfully finished my habilitation.
2009-11   My son Nick Julian is born.
2009-10   The negotiations for the new EU project First-MM have been successfully completed.
2009-10   I took over Wolfram's duties as a professor for the next year.
2009-09   Our new FP7-IST EU project First-MM is currently under negotiations.
2009-08   I will serve as an Area Chair for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2010.
2009-08   I will serve as an Associate Editor for International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2010.
2009-06  I am editing the JFR Special Issue on Visual Mapping and Navigation Outdoors together with Stefan Williams and Jose Neira.
2009-05  My book Robotic Mapping and Exploration has been published by Springer.
2009-04  Our new RSS paper on LDA-based discovery of object classes has been accepted.
2009-04  Our proposal for a new EU project has been submitted.
2009-03  Our IJCAI paper has been accepted.
2009-03  Our new EU project EUROPA starts.
2008-11  Our ICRA'09 workshop on Visual Mapping and Navigation in Outdoor Environments organized by Jose Neira, myself, and Stefan Williams has been accepted and will take place on the 12th of May 2009 in Kobe (Japan).
2008-07   I became Associate Editor for "Reactive and Sensor-Based Planning" for the program committee of IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA).
2008-07   Our proposal for a new EU project called EUROPA in the call for "Cognitive Systems, Interaction, and Robotics" is the highest ranked propsal among all STREPs and IPs.
2008-07   I became Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).
2008-03   I received the 7th EURON Georges Giralt Award for the best robotics thesis defended in Europe in 2006!
2008-01   New version of our Tree-based netwORk Optimizer (TORO) has been released (fixes a convergence problem in 3D).
2008-01   I am in the program committee of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2008 (PGAI).
2007-12   I am in the program committee of the International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation & Robotics (ICINCO) 2008.
2007-10   I am in the program committee of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2008.
2007-09   Download the tutorial slides on RBPF-SLAM presented at the ECMR'07.
2007-08   I am in the program committee of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2008.
2007-05   First release of our new Tree-based netwORk Optimizer (TORO).
2007-05   I am in the program committee of the Embedded Systems and Robotics track on the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
2007-01   OpenSLAM.org is now online!
2007-01   I am in the program committee of the International Conference on Robot Communication and Coordination (ROBOCOMM) 2007
2006-12   I am in the program committee of the International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR) 2007
2006-11   Our SFB/TR-8 has been approved for 4 additional years of funding
2006-11   I moved from Zurich to Freiburg
2006-10   I received the Wolfgang-Gentner-Award for my PhD thesis
2006-10   My daughter Janna Marie is born!
2006-09   I am publicity chair and publication chair of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2007
2006-09   Local arrangement for the IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) 2007 in Zurich
2006-09   I am in the program commitee of the European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR) 2007
2006-04   I moved to Zurich (ETH Zurich, IRIS, ASL)
2006-04   PhD defense - summa cum laude
2006-01   I submitted my PhD thesis
2005-12   CARMEN integration meeting in Boston
2005-12   I am responsible the conference management system of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2006
2005-08   I received the IROS/ICASE best paper award on application
2005-04   Finalist - ICRA 2005 best student paper