Wolfram Burgard

Infobox_Scientist
name = Wolfram Burgard

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caption =
birth_date = 1961
birth_place = Gelsenkirchen, Germany
death_date =
death_place =
residence =
nationality =
field = Robotics
work_institution = University of Freiburg
alma_mater = University of Bonn
Dortmund University of Technology
doctoral_advisor = Armin B. Cremers

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.

Biography

Education

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

Career

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.

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, 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.

Wolfram Burgard together with his long-term collaborators Dieter Fox and Sebastian Thrun is a co-author of the book "Probabilistic Robotics".cite book
author = Thrun, S.
coauthors = Burgard, W.; Fox, D.
year =
title = Probabilistic Robotics
publisher = MIT Press
isbn = 0262201623] He also is a co-author of the book "Principles of Robot Motion - Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations"cite book
author = Choset, H.M.
coauthors = Lynch, K.M.; Hutchinson, S.A.;Kantor, G.; Burgard, W.; Kavraki, L.E.; Thrun, S.
year = 2005
title = Principles of Robot Motion: theory, algorithms, and implementation
publisher = MIT Press
isbn = 0262033275] , together with
Howie Choset, Kevin M. Lynch, Seth A. Hutchinson, George Kantor, Lydia E. Kavraki and Sebastian Thrun.

Wolfram Burgard has 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.

References

External links

* [http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~burgard/ Wolfram Burgard's home page]
* [http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~ais/ Wolfram Burgard's research group]