Short Curriculum Vitae

I am working as an academic advisor (Akademischer Rat) in the Lab for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Freiburg. I am an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. 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 including scene analysis as well as in computer controlled cars, vision and navigation techniques. See my publication list and research page for further details.

From November 2006 to September 2007, I was a postdoc in Freiburg. Up to November 2006, I was a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in the Autonomous Systems Lab in Zurich. I worked in the lab of Roland Siegwart.
From 2002 to April 2006, I joined Wolfram Burgard's lab in Freiburg. In April 2006, I finished my PhD thesis entitled "Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots" at the Department of Computer Science, University of Freiburg.
Before my PhD, I studied physics and computer science at the University of Marburg and received the bachelor degree ("Vordiplom") in both disciplines. In 2000, I continued my studies in computer science at the University of Freiburg and received my master degree ("Diplom") in 2002.
(short cv)

You are interested in a detailed resume? Simply send me an email!

Awards

  • 7th EURON Georges Giralt Award for the best robotics thesis in Europe in 2006 (received in 2008).
  • Wolfgang-Gentner PhD Award (2006)
    for my PhD thesis Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots .
  • ICRA 2005 -- Finalist best student paper (2005)
    for the paper Supervised Learning of Places from Range Data using AdaBoost.
  • ICASE-IROS 2004 best paper award on application (2005)
    for the paper Grid-based FastSLAM and Exploration with Active Loop Closing.
  • Award of the German Engeneering Society, VDI (2003) for my master's thesis Zielgerichtete Kollisionsvermeidung fuer mobile Roboter in dynamischen Umgebungen.

Services for Journals

  • Associate Editor
    • IEEE Transactions on Robotics, since 2008

  • Reviewing for Journals
    • IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
    • Autonomous Robots, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008
    • International Journal on Robotics Research, 2006, 2008
    • Robots and Autonomous Systems, 2005, 2006, 2007
    • International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 2007
    • Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 2007
    • Journal of Field Robotics, 2007

Conference Services

  • Associate Editor
    • IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2009
  • Publicity Chair
    • Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2007

  • Publication Chair
    • Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2007

  • Local Arrangement
    • IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), 2007

  • Conference Management System
    • Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2006
    • IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), 2007

  • Program Committee
    • Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
    • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (former AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence), 2006, 2008 (PGAI)
    • International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2008
    • Embedded Systems and Robotics track on the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2008
    • Intelligent Robotics Systems track on the 24rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2009
    • International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO), 2008
    • International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), 2007
    • International Conference on Robot Communication and Coordination (ROBOCOMM), 2007
    • European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR), 2007

  • Poster Program Committee
    • IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2006

  • Reviewing
    • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2003, 2005, 2007
    • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (former AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence), 2005, 2006, 2008 (PGAI)
    • Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
    • IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
    • IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
    • International Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR), 2007
    • IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2006
    • International Conference on Automation and Robotics (ICAR), 2005, 2007
    • Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV), 2004, 2007
    • Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS), 2008
    • European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR), 2003, 2005, 2007
    • Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI), 2005
    • Spatial Cognition (SC), 2004, 2006, 2008
    • Robotik, 2004, 2006