RI Seminar : Dr. Stefan Leutenegger

Dr. Stefan Leutenegger

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Bio: Stefan is an Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in the School of Computation, Information and Technology (CIT) and has further affiliations with the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) as well as Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI). He leads the Smart Robotics Lab (SRL) working at the intersection of perception, mobile robotics, and machine learning. Stefan also still holds the position of a visiting Reader at the Department of Computing of Imperial College London, his previous post. He has also co-founded SLAMcore, a spin-out company aiming at commercialisation of localisation and mapping solutions for robots and drones. Stefan has received a BSc and from ETH Zurich, as well as a PhD on “Unmanned solar airplanes: design and algorithms for efficient and robust autonomous operation” in 2014.

Abstract: To power the next generation of complex robotic systems, the field of spatial perception has made much progress from robust multi-sensor SLAM to dense, semantic, and object-level maps, with the aim of understanding open-ended environments as a basis for mobile robot navigation and environment interaction. I will show recent progress in reliable and real-time capable state estimation and 3D scene understanding using vision, LiDAR, IMUs, and more – where we heavily rely on both models and modern Machine Learning. Our approaches are demonstrated as core building blocks for a range of robot applications, from mobile manipulation on construction sites to drones flying in obstructed indoor spaces and through the forest.

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