Academic Career and Research Areas

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 (e.g. drone) using its sensors (e.g. video) to reconstruct 3D structure as well as to categorise 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.

Awards

  • Imperial College President's Award for Excellence in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2018)
  • Nominee for an Imperial’s Student Academic Choice Award, SACA (2018-2020)
  • Best Paper Honourable Mention at CVPR with CodeSLAM by M. Bloesch, J. Czarnowski, R. Clark, S. Leutenegger, A. J. Davison (2018)
  • Best paper award at ECCV with “Real-Time 3D Reconstruction and 6-DoF Tracking with an Event Camera” by H. Kim, S. Leutenegger, A. J. Davison (2016)
  • ETH Medal for outstanding doctoral theses (2015)

Tzoumanikas D, Graule F, Yan Q, Shah D, Popovic M, Leutenegger S. "Aerial Manipulation Using Hybrid Force and Position NMPC Applied to Aerial Writing". Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS). 2020.

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Xu B, Li W, Tzoumanikas D, Bloesch M, Davison AJ, Leutenegger S. "MID-Fusion: Octree-based Object-Level Multi-Instance Dynamic SLAM". 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 2019.

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Whelan T, Salas-Moreno RF, Glocker B, Davison AJ, Leutenegger S. "ElasticFusion: Real-Time Dense SLAM and Light Source Estimation". Intl. J. of Robotics Research, IJRR. 2016.

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Leutenegger S, Lynen S, Bosse M, Siegwart R, Furgale P: "Keyframe-based visual–inertial odometry using nonlinear optimization". The International Journal of Robotics Research. 2014; pp.0278364914554813.

Abstract

Leutenegger S, Chli, M, Siegwart, RY: "BRISK: Binary robust invariant scalable keypoints". Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011 IEEE International Conference on. 2011; pp.2548–2555.

Abstract