My academic work at the Social Robotics Lab in Freiburg was mainly funded by the EU FP7 project SPENCER, which involved deploying a first-of-its-kind autonomous service robot in a crowded airport environment. Earlier, over a duration of 5 years in my free time, I developed a 2D real-time strategy game called Sorades – Die Befreiung, which won the Newcomer Award at the German Game Developer Award 2006. My other interests include photography, travelling, and aviation.
News
October 2022: Check out the latest episode of the Bosch Global Podcast “From Know-How to Wow” on our research project DARKO!
January 2022: Our publicly funded EU H2020 project DARKO is featured in a story on bosch.com: “DARKO – Object-throwing robots with people skills”.
August 2021: Check out our IROS 2021 paper “Cross-Modal Analysis of Human Detection for Robotics: An Industrial Case Study” on arXiv!
July 2021: Successful conclusion of the EU H2020 project ILIAD which I was involved in as a work package leader for Human-Aware AGV Fleets!
January 2021: Kick-off of the EU H2020 project DARKO, where I am leading WP2: 3D Perception and Scene Understanding.
April 2020: Successfully defended my PhD thesis on multi-modal human detection, tracking and analysis for robots in crowded environments at the University of Freiburg!
June 2019: Got a paper accepted at the 3D Scene Generation workshop at CVPR 2019 in Long Beach, CA! I will also be attending RSS 2019 in Freiburg.
May 2019: I have been awarded an Outstanding Reviewer Award at ICRA 2019 in Montreal, Canada!
September 2018: Two workshop papers (joint work led by István Sárandi, RWTH Aachen) accepted at ECCV’18 and IROS’18 on Synthetic Occlusion Augmentation for 3D Human Pose Estimation. We won the PoseTrack 3D challenge at ECCV!
April 2018: Joint paper with RWTH Aachen on Deep Person Detection in 2D Range Data accepted for Robotics and Automation Letters!
January 2017: Kick-off of EU H2020 research project ILIAD on intralogistics, where I am work package leader for Human-Aware AGV Fleets.
September 2016: My PhD advisor Kai, our robot SPENCER and I were featured as invited guests in an episode of the Tigerentenclub, a popular German TV show targeted at school children. SPENCER performed well in the spotlight in front of five cameras!
June 2016: I joined Bosch Corporate Research in Renningen, Germany, as a full-time researcher in robotics and perception!
May 2016: Last month, the SPENCER project ended with a very successful demonstration at Amsterdam-Schiphol airport. The SPENCER robot is now resting peacefully in its wooden storage box. A TV report on our project, also featuring me, was recently shown on German television. Goodbye SPENCER!
February 2016: The end of the SPENCER project is approaching quickly and we are preparing for next month’s final demonstration at Amsterdam-Schiphol!
December 2015: First week-long deployment of the SPENCER robot at Schiphol for initial testing (pictures!). People were very curious and overall reacted very positively. Also lots of press coverage, e.g. by Heise Online, The Telegraph, Daily Mail or phys.org.
November 2015: SPENCER robot is coming to Freiburg, where my colleagues Luigi, Billy and I will do the final preparations for the first Schiphol deployment. My main focus will be on making the robot operate safely among humans in crowded spaces.
October 2015: I presented my paper on full-body human attribute recognition in RGB-D in one of the computer vision sessions at IROS’15 in Hamburg. Later on, headed to Toulouse for SPENCER integration week IV.
April 2015: Just came back from an eventful SPENCER Integration Week III (see gallery). Also check out our new video on Real-Time Multi-Modal People Tracking in Crowded Environments! The code is available on GitHub.
January 2015: My paper on Real-Time Full-Body Human Gender Recognition in (RGB)-D Data has been accepted for presentation at ICRA’15. Looking forward to visiting Seattle in May! I also submitted a follow-up paper to IROS 2015 in Hamburg, Germany.
October 2014: After submitting a paper to ICRA’15, it is now time to prepare for the SPENCER integration event in Toulouse! I’ll be heading there twice, during the first meeting we will set up the basic robot software infrastructure in a smaller team. Looking forward to working with the robot for the first time! Also going to Aachen for people tracker integration. Update: Demo videos of single-person and group guidance now online!