Wolfram Burgard, Professor of Computer Science, University of Technology Nuremberg speaking at the AI for Good Global Summit 2018 15–17 May 2018, Geneva
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 that installed the mobile robot Rhino as the first interactive museum tour-guide robot in the Deutsches Museum Bonn, Germany in 1997.[2] In 1998, he and his colleagues deployed the mobile robot Minerva in the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.[3] In 1999, Wolfram Burgard became Professor for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. In 2022, he became Professor for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence as well as Founding Chair of the Department Engineering of the University of Technology Nuremberg.[1]
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 that can robustly track the position of a mobile robot, estimate its global position when it starts without any prior knowledge about it, and 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 have 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 has the 2009 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the most prestigious German research prize.[6] He has furthermore received seven best paper awards from outstanding conferences. He also became a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.