I am a professor of computer science at the division of Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL) at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). My interest is mainly centered around robotics and autonomous systems. I like to put theory into practice and most of the time I am driven by problems rather than methods. Even after 20+ years in the field, a robot that actually does something on its own makes me excited. I have spent quite some energy into taken the methods from academia out into the real world, mainly through the company Intelligent Machines.

During the last decade my research has been focused on spatial cognition. I am interested in providing robotics with the tools to "understand" the world, for lack of a better world. I spent quite some time working on high level approaches to this, but I am now back where I started and build ground up instead. This means starting from the sensor data and modeling the world. The recent leaps in mainly visual perception means that what I worked on at a high, mainly symbolic, level now is getting close to come together with the lower levels. A real world result from this strand of work, that started as a quest to gather data from people's home, is the company Volumental. Volumental builds 3D foot scanners sold across the world that allows companies to give their customer a new experience and better fitting shoes.