Professor at Imperical College London, director of the Aerial Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London and the Head of the Materials and Technology Centre of Robotics at the Empa Material Science Institute in Switzerland.
His research focusses on the development of novel, biologically inspired flying robots for distributed sensing in air and water and on autonomous robotic construction for digital infrastructure systems. Prof. Kovac's particular specialisation is in robot design, fluid-structure interaction and multi-modal robot mobility. He is internationally known as an emerging leader in bio-inspired aerial robotics. He is winner of several awards and the author of over 50 articles on mobile robotics that have been published in major journals, including Science, IEEE Transactions and Science Robotics. Prof. Kovac regularly advises industry, investment funds and government on robotic research strategy is holder of the prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship.
Prof. Stefano Mintchev
Assistant Professor at ETH Zürich and head of the Environmental Robotics Lab.
Stefano Mintchev studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pisa and at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (2005-2010). He received his Ph.D. degree in Biorobotics in 2014 from The BioRobotics Institute (Italy). In the period 2014-2018 he was postdoctoral researcher in Aerial Robotics at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL (Switzerland) with Prof. Floreano. In 2017 he co-founded and contributed to the development of the start-up Foldaway Haptics, where he served as CTO until March 2020.
At the moment, he is working on aerial robots for environmental sensing, collecting environmental DNA in dense vegetation, natural cavities, and other inaccessible natural locations.
Dr. Hemma Philamore
Lecturer at School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, University of Bristol
Hemma Philamore received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Bristol, in 2016. From 2017 to 2020, she was a Junior Associate Professor at Kyoto University, Japan. She is currently a Lecturer in robotics and autonomous systems with the University of Bristol, U.K. She specializes in soft, energy-autonomous and bio-hybrid robots–including microbial and protein-based systems for electrical power generation and sensing.
Professor at University of Bonn and heads the Lab for Photogrammetry and Robotics
Bio: Cyrill Stachniss is a Full Professor at the University of Bonn and heads the Lab for Photogrammetry and Robotics. He is additionally a Visiting Professor in Engineering at the University of Oxford and is with the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Before working in Bonn, he was a lecturer at the University of Freiburg’s AIS Lab, a guest lecturer at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, and a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in the ALS Lab of Roland Siegwart. Cyrill Stachniss finished his habilitation in 2009 and received his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots” supervised by Wolfram Burgard at the University of Freiburg in 2006. From 2008-2013, he was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, since 2010 a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, and received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2013. Since 2015, he is a senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He is the spokesperson of the DFG Cluster of Excellence EXC 2070 ”PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” and of the DFG Research Unit FOR 1505 ”Mapping on Demand”. He was furthermore involved in the coordination of several EC-funded FP7 and H2020 projects. In his research, he focuses on probabilistic techniques in the context of mobile robotics, navigation, and perception. Central areas of his research are solutions to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem, visual perception, robot learning, self-driving cars, agricultural robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles. He has coauthored more than 280 peer-reviewed publications.
Assistant professor with dual affiliations to both the department of geography and chemistry at UZH.
Professor Schuman studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and received the BSc degree in molecular biology and philosophy. She then joined the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, where she graduated with a PhD from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 2012. She joined the ranks of the MPI Jena, first as a junior group leader and then as the ecology platform leader, where she initiated her own research program. In 2018, she moved to the UZH, first as a guest professor and now as an assistant professor. She received a number of awards and scholarships, such as the Max Planck Society Otto Hahn Medal awarded in recognition of outstanding scientific achievement, organized scientific meetings and lectures, and established strong outreach activities. The research program of Professor Schuman is rooted in chemical ecology and her current efforts leverage this knowledge to the understanding of the spatial and temporal effects of natural products on landscapes.
Associate Director for Robotics and Director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT).
From February 2011 to March 2021 she was the Director of the IIT Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR) in Pontedera. From July 2012 to 2017, she also covered the role of Deputy Director for the Supervision and Organization of the IIT Centers Network.
Her research activities are in the areas of biologically-inspired robotics and soft robotics . In this context, she is the pioneer of the fields of plant-inspired robots and growing robots .
Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University
He received his B.S. from the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY in 2004. After serving in the Army for five years, Dr. Davidson worked as a project manager for the CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company at Hanford, WA from 2009 to 2012. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from Washington State University and was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2016 to 2018.
Dr. Davidson's group performs fundamental and applied research at the intersection of mechanics, machine learning, and controls. Current areas of emphasis include robotic manipulation and soft robotics.
Prof. Sabine Hauert
Sabine Hauert is Reader (Associate Professor) of Swarm Engineering at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research focusses on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics. Profoundly cross-disciplinary, Sabine works between Engineering Mathematics, the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, and Life Sciences. She’s PI or Co-I on more than 30M GBP in grant funding and has served on national and international committees, including the UK Robotics Growth Partnership, the Royal Society Working Group on Machine Learning and Data Community of Interest, and several IEEE boards. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL.
Sabine is also President and Co-founder of Robohub.org, and executive trustee of AIhub.org, two non-profits dedicated to connecting the robotics and AI communities to the public.
As an expert in science communication with 15 years of experience, Sabine is often invited to discuss the future of robotics and AI, including in the journals Science and Nature, at the European Parliament, and at the Royal Society. Her work has been featured in mainstream media including BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The Economist, TEDx, WIRED, and New Scientist.
Lecturer at University of Technology Sydney
Graeme Best is a Lecturer in robotics at the University of Technology Sydney. From 2018 to 2022 he was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute at Oregon State University. He completed his PhD, titled “Planning Algorithms for Multi-Robot Active Perception”, with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at The University of Sydney and has also worked with the DSTG Maritime Division and CSIRO Autonomous Systems Lab. Dr Best’s research broadly involves developing autonomy for multi-robot systems and he has delivered contributions ranging from new fundamental algorithms to full-scale system demonstrations with a vast range of robot platforms. He is the winner or finalist of awards at top robotics conferences (RSS, ICRA, IROS) and won the first round of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (with Carnegie Mellon University). He is actively involved with the research community as an Associate Editor (ICRA, IROS, MRS), workshop organiser, and invited speaker at internationally-leading robotics labs.