SPEAKERS

Katherine Kuchenbecker

Bio: Katherine J. Kuchenbecker is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart, Germany, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Stuttgart. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with Günter Niemeyer at Stanford University in 2006, did postdoctoral research with Allison M. Okamura at the Johns Hopkins University, and was an engineering professor in the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania from 2007 to 2016. Her research blends haptics, teleoperation, physical human-robot interaction, tactile sensing, and medical applications. She delivered a TEDYouth talk on haptics in 2012 and has been honored with a 2009 NSF CAREER Award, the 2012 IEEE RAS Academic Early Career Award, a 2014 Penn Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2021, and 19 best paper, poster, demonstration, and reviewer awards. She co-chaired the IEEE Haptics Symposium in 2016 and 2018 and is Editor-in-Chief of the 2025 IEEE World Haptics Conference.

Hiro Ono

Bio: Masahiro (Hiro) Ono is a Research Technologist and the Group Supervisor of the Robotic Surface Mobility Group. His primary interest is to enable the exploration of previously inaccessible planetary destinations through innovative robotic systems, combining versatile mobility and intelligent onboard autonomy. To this goal, he led a number of high-profile research projects. Most notably, he served as the PI of the EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) project, which received ~$15M investment to develop a snake-like robot for enabling the exploration of the subsurface ocean of Enceladus through its erupting vent. Previously, he led the MAARS (Machine learning-based Analytics for Automated Rover Systems) project to explore a new paradigm of planetary surface exploration with a highly automated system. Other projects that he led include three NIAC studies on Enceladus Vent Explorer (Phase I and II) and Comet Hitchhiker (Phase I), funded by NASA's STMD, as well as the Human-cooperative Risk-aware Autonomy project funded by ONR. 

He also has substantial flight project experiences, particularly on the Mars 2020 Rover Mission, where he led the Surface Traversability Analysis for the landing selection, developed the enhanced autonomous driving capability, and supported tactical uplink and downlink operations of the rover. He received JPL's Software of the Year Award in 2021 for the ML-based terrain classifier, which was used for the M2020 landing selection and MSL ground operation. He also ran a highly successful crowdsourcing project called AI4Mars to collect the training dataset for the terrain classifier, which was participated by ~17K volunteers on the internet. Previously, he also contributed to the development of autonomous sampling site selection for Europa Lander.

Stefan Leutenegger

Bio: Prof. Leutenegger's (*1983) field of research is the area of ​​mobile robotics, with focus on robot navigation through potentially unknown environments. He develops algorithms and software, which allow a robot (eg drone) using its sensors (eg video) to reconstruct 3D structures as well as to categorize it with the help of modern machine learning (including deep learning). This understanding enables safe navigation through challenging environments, as well as the interaction with it (including humans). Prof. Leutenegger has been Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) at TUM since 2021. Before, he was Lecturer (since 2014) and Senior Lecturer (since 2018) at Imperial College London, where he was part of the Dyson Robotics Lab, and where he has later established the Smart Robotics Lab. Prof. Leutenegger has received his PhD in 2014 from ETH Zurich working on Unmanned Solar Airplanes including their navigation and control in Prof. Roland Siegwart's Autonomous Systems Lab. Previously, he received BSc (2006) and MSc (2009) in Mechanical Eng. from ETH.

Rob Mahony

Bio: Robert Mahony is a Professor in the School of Engineering at the Australian National University. He received a PhD in 1995 (systems engineering) and a BSc in 1989 (applied mathematics and geology) both from the Australian National University. He worked as a marine seismic geophysicist and an industrial research scientist before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in France and a Logan Fellowship at Monash University in Australia. He has held his post at ANU since 2001.

Sylvia Herbert

Bio: Sylvia Herbert is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego.  Prior to joining UCSD, she received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley, where she studied with Professor Claire Tomlin on safe and efficient control of autonomous systems.  Before that she earned her BS/MS at Drexel University in Mechanical Engineering.  She is the recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award, Hellman Fellowship, UCSD JSOE Early Career Faculty Award, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, NSF GRFP, UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and the Berkeley EECS Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award for Altruism. When not working she enjoys reading, hiking, cooking, and gardening.

Maniktanan Nambi

Bio: Manikantan Nambi is an Applied Science Manager at Amazon Robotics, where he leads the development of next-generation item manipulation systems. His team uses machine learning and smart mechanical design to build smarter, more capable robots. Mani was instrumental in launching the Robin and Sparrow robotic manipulation systems, which have handled several billion packages and items in Amazon warehouses. He has advised Amazon Robotics on multimillion-dollar acquisitions and is a key driver of its science and publication strategy. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Utah, where he developed a novel robot for retina surgery.

Stefan Leutenegger

Sylvia Herbert

Katherine Kuchenbecker

Rob Mahony

Shoudong Huang

Bio: Prof. Shoudong Huang received the Bachelor and Master degrees in Mathematics, Ph.D. in Automatic Control from Northeastern University, China in 1987, 1990, and 1998, respectively. Before joining the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2004, he worked at the University of Hong Kong and the Australian National University as a postdoctoral research fellow. He is currently a Professor and Deputy Head of School (Research) in the School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at UTS, and Deputy Director of the Robotics Institute at UTS. His research interests include nonlinear system state estimation and control, mobile robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and surgical robotics. 

He has published more than 200 research papers. His research has received several awards, including the Chancellor’s Medal for Research Excellence in the 2020 UTS Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Research Excellence, the Supervisor of the Year Award in the 2023 UTS Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Research Excellence, and the best paper award at the 14th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (2016). He was the winner of the 2019 New South Wales iAwards (Public Sector and Government), and he was a finalist in the ANSTO Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology (2019).

He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) from 2019 to 2022 and is now serving as an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR). He also served as an Editor for IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) from 2020 to 2022. He served as the Publication Chair for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2022, and the Registration Chair for RSS 2023. He will host RSS 2026 at UTS. 

Hiro Ono

Manikantan Nambi

Moritz Baecher

Bio: Moritz Baecher is the Associate Lab Director of Disney’s Zurich-based robotics team, where he lead a strategic program focusing on the development of novel model- and learning-based tools for the design and control of believable robotic characters. His core expertise is the optimal design and control of both soft and rigid systems, using a combination of differentiable simulation and reinforcement learning. Prior to joining Disney, he received a Ph.D. from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a master’s degree from ETH Zurich.

Jenny Iglesias

Bio:  Jenny Iglesias is a Staff Software Engineer at Waymo, where she works on Waymo's planning system. Throughout her tenure at Waymo, Jenny has played a pivotal role in refining how the Waymo Driver understands, reacts to, and interacts with pedestrians, cyclists, and occluded objects. Her leadership has been instrumental in improving the safety, comfort, and understanding of the Waymo Driver for all road users. Building off of experience improving interactions with road users, she has led a restructuring of the Waymo planner system to improve the APIs around the reasoning system which builds a description of good driving which feeds into the various planning algorithms. Prior to Waymo, she earned her Ph.D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization at Carnegie Mellon University. 

Andrew Taylor

Bio: Andrew Taylor is a Senior Engineer Team Lead for the Vehicle Integrated Controller team at Motional, an autonomous vehicle company formed as a joint venture between the Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv in 2020. In this role, he leads a team responsible for the safe and comfortable low-level control of Motional's Ioniq5 autonomous vehicle platform. Prior to joining Motional, Andrew received his PhD in Control & Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where his research focused on robust methods for safety-critical control through convex optimization. Before that he earned his BS/MS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan.