Wolfram Burgard

Professor of computer science at the University of Freiburg and head of the research lab for Autonomous Intelligent Systems, Ph.D. - University of Bonn.

Wolfram Burgard

Professor Burgard has recommended books in the following areas:

Artificial Intelligence

Robotics

Biography

Wolfram Burgard (born 1961 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany) is a German roboticist. He is a full professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg where he heads the Laboratory for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. He is known for his substantial contributions to the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem as well as diverse other contributions to robotics.

Wolfram Burgard received his Diploma degree from University of Dortmund in 1987 and his Doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1991. His thesis advisor was Armin B. Cremers.

In 1991 he became a research assistant at the University of Bonn, 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, Germany in 1997. In 1998, he and his colleagues deployed the mobile robot Minerva in the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. In 1999, Wolfram Burgard became Professor for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

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, Dieter Fox, Sebastian Thrun, and Wolfram Burgard developed Monte Carlo localization, 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 simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem, which is to determine the map of the environment and the position of the robot at the same time.

Professor Burgard has an h-index of 121, and more than 94,000 citations, according to Google Scholar.

Awards and Achievements

  • ICRA 2020 Milestone Award. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Monte Carlo Localization for Mobile Robots, 2020.

  • IROS 2019 Best Paper Award. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Planning Reactive Manipulation in Dynamic Environments, 2019. IV 2018 Best Paper Award. IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Courtesy Behavior for Highly Automated Vehicles on Highway Interchanges, 2018.

  • ICRA 2018 Best Robot Vision Paper Award. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Optimization Beyond the Convolution: Generalizing Spatial Relations with End-to-End Metric Learning, 2018.

  • IROS Harashima Award for Innovative Technologies. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), For pioneering research in robotic simultaneous localization and mapping, 2018.

  • AAAI 1999 Classic Paper Award, 2017.

  • AAAI 1998 Classic Paper Award, 2016.

  • euRobotics Technology Transfer Award, 2015.

  • Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2015.

  • Member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina, 2014.

  • Member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2012.

  • Most Useful Contribution Award, ROS 3D Kinect Contest, Willow Garage, 2011.

  • ERC Advanced Grant, 2010.

  • IROS 2010 Best Paper Award. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Probabilistic Rule Set Joint State Update as Approximation to the Full Joint State Estimation Applied to Multi Object Scene Analysis, 2010.

  • UAV 2010 Best Paper Award. International Conference and Exhibition on Unmanned Areal Vehicles (UAV), Towards Palm-Size Autonomous Helicopters, 2010

  • ICRA 2009 Best Paper Award. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Towards a Navigation System for Autonomous Indoor Flying, 2009.

  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, 2009.

  • Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2009.

  • Fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), 2008.

  • Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, 2005-2007.

  • Most active IEEE technical committee award. IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2005.

  • IROS 2004 Best Paper Award on applications. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Exploration with Active Loop-Closing for FastSLAM, 2004.

  • 2004 IJCAII-JAIR honorable mention award. Markov Localization for Mobile Robots in Dynamic Environments, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 11, 1999.

  • INRIA-EPFL prize for the IROS 2002 best paper on Mobile Robot Navigation and Perception,. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Mapping with mobile Robots in Populated Environments, 2002.

  • ICRA 2000 Best Paper Award. IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), A Real-Time Algorithm for Mobile Robot Mapping with Applications to Multi-Robot and 3D Mapping, 2000.

  • AAAI 1998 Outstanding Paper Award. National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), The Interactive Museum Tour-guide Robot, 1998.

  • DAGM 1999 Outstanding Paper Award. 21st Symposium on Pattern Recognition (DAGM), Collaborative Multi-Robot Localization, 1999.

  • IROS 1998 Best Paper Award. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), An Experimental Comparison of Localization Methods, 1998.

  • KI 1998 Best Paper Award. 22nd German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI), GOLEX

  • Bridging The Gap between Logic (Golog) and a Real Robot, 1998.

  • AAAI 1994 autonomous mobile robot competition Second Place Award. Clean-up an office event of the 1994 AAAI autonomous mobile robot competition, 1994.