Wolfram Burgard (born 1961 in

Gelsenkirchen Gelsenkirchen (, , ; wep, Gelsenkiärken) is the 25th most populous city of Germany and the 11th most populous in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with 262,528 (2016) inhabitants. On the Emscher River (a tributary of the Rhine), it lies ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

) is a German

roboticist Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...

. He is a full professor at the

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg The University of Freiburg (colloquially german: Uni Freiburg), officially the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (german: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), is a public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemb ...

where he heads the Laboratory for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. He is known for his substantial contributions to the

simultaneous localization and mapping Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chick ...

(

SLAM Slam, SLAM or SLAMS may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional elements * S.L.A.M. (Strategic Long-Range Artillery Machine), a fictional weapon in the ''G.I. Joe'' universe * SLAMS (Space-Land-Air Missile Shield), a fictional anti-ball ...

) problem as well as diverse other contributions to robotics.

Biography

Education

Wolfram Burgard received his Diploma degree from

University of Dortmund TU Dortmund University (german: Technische Universität Dortmund) is a technical university in Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany with over 35,000 students, and over 6,000 staff including 300 professors, offering around 80 Bachelor's and ...

in 1987 and his Doctorate from the

University of Bonn The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine U ...

in 1991. His thesis advisor was

Armin B. Cremers Armin Bernd Cremers (born June 7, 1946) is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor in the computer science institute at the University of Bonn, Germany. He is most notable for his contributions to several fields of discre ...

Career

In 1991 he became a research assistant at the

, where he led the laboratory for Autonomous Mobile Systems. He was head of the research group which installed the mobile robot Rhino as the first interactive museum tour-guide robot in the

Deutsches Museum Bonn The Deutsches Museum Bonn is a museum with exhibits and experiments of famous scientists, engineers and inventors. Its central themes are research and technology in Germany after 1945. It is part of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It was founded ...

, Germany in 1997. In 1998, he and his colleagues deployed the mobile robot Minerva in the

National Museum of American History The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves, and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific, and military history. Among the items on display is t ...

Washington DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

. In 1999, Wolfram Burgard became Professor for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the

Research

Together with his colleagues, Wolfram Burgard developed numerous probabilistic approaches to mobile robot navigation. This includes Markov localization, a probabilistic approach to mobile localization which can robustly track the position of a mobile robot, estimate its global position when it starts without any prior knowledge about it, and can even recover from localization failures. In 1999,

Frank Dellaert Frank Dellaert is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also affiliated with the IRIM@GT center and is well known for contributions to Robotics and Computer Vision. Early Education Sinc ...

Dieter Fox Dieter Fox is a German-American roboticist and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Bonn in 1998. He is most notable ...

Sebastian Thrun Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Comp ...

, and Wolfram Burgard developed

Monte Carlo localization Monte Carlo localization (MCL), also known as particle filter localization,Ioannis M. Rekleitis.A Particle Filter Tutorial for Mobile Robot Localization" ''Centre for Intelligent Machines, McGill University, Tech. Rep. TR-CIM-04-02'' (2004). is an a ...

, a probabilistic approach to mobile robot localization that is based on particle filters. Wolfram Burgard and his group has also made substantial contributions to the

(

) problem, which is to determine the map of the environment and the position of the robot at the same time. Wolfram Burgard together with his long-term collaborators

and

is a co-author of the book ''

Probabilistic Robotics Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speaking, ...

''. He also is a co-author of the book ''

Principles of Robot Motion - Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations A principle is a proposition or value that is a guide for behavior or evaluation. In law, it is a rule that has to be or usually is to be followed. It can be desirably followed, or it can be an inevitable consequence of something, such as the law ...

'', together with

Howie Choset Howie Choset is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His research includes snakebots, or robots designed in a segmented fashion to mimic snake-like actuation and motion, demining, and coverage. His snake robots have also ...

, Kevin M. Lynch, Seth A. Hutchinson,

George Kantor George may refer to: People * George (given name) * George (surname) * George (singer), American-Canadian singer George Nozuka, known by the mononym George * George Washington, First President of the United States * George W. Bush, 43rd Preside ...

, Lydia E. Kavraki and

. Wolfram Burgard has the 2009

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (german: link=no, Förderpreis für deutsche Wissenschaftler im Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Programm der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft), in short Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to ...

, the most prestigious German research prize. He has furthermore received seven best paper awards from outstanding conferences. He also became a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. In 2008, Wolfram Burgard became a fellow of the

European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence The European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) (formerly European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI)) is the representative body for the European artificial intelligence community. EurAI was established in 19 ...

. In 2009, Wolfram Burgard became fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

. In 2010, he received an Advanced Grant of the

European Research Council The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific ...

Students

Wolfram Burgard supervised several PhD students in his lab for Autonomous Intelligent Systems, namely Maren Bennewitz (2004), Dirk Haehnel (2005), Cyrill Stachniss (2006), Rudolph Triebel (2007), Óscar Martínez Mozos (2008), Patrick Pfaff (2008), and Christian Plagemann (2008), Jürgen Sturm (2011), Daniel Meyer-Delius Di Vasto (2011), Slawomir Grzonka (2011), Thilo Grundmann (2012), Kai Wurm (2012), Axel Rottmann (2012), Barbara Frank (2013), Rainer Kümmerle (2013), Bastian Steder (2013),

Jörg Müller Jörg Müller (, ; born 3 September 1969) is a Dutch-born German BMW factory driver. Racing career Born in Kerkrade, Netherlands, Müller won the titles in 1989 German Formula Opel Lotus Challenge and in 1989 European Formula Ford 1600. The 199 ...

(2013), Dominik Joho (2013), Boris Lau (2013), Maximilian Beinhofer (2014). A large fraction of his publications are available at

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

References

External links

Wolfram Burgard's home page

Wolfram Burgard's research group
{{DEFAULTSORT:Burgard, Wolfram 1961 births Living people German computer scientists German roboticists Artificial intelligence researchers Technical University of Dortmund alumni University of Bonn alumni Academic staff of the University of Freiburg Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winners Fellows of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence