Wolfram Burgard | |
---|---|
Born | 1961 Gelsenkirchen, Germany |
Residence | Germany |
Nationality | German |
Alma mater |
University of Bonn Dortmund University of Technology |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Robotics |
Institutions | University of Freiburg |
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.
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.