Bio Sketch
Nikolaus is a post-doctoral associate at the Distributed Robotics Lab , MIT CSAIL, where he works with Daniela Rus since he graduated from EPFL in October 2007 with a PhD in Computer Science. Before joining MIT, Nikolaus worked with Alcherio Martinoli at the Swarm-Intelligent Systems Group at EPFL and as a research assistant in the Collective Robotics Group at Caltech in 2003.
Nikolaus earned a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zürich) in spring 2003. He wrote his master's thesis at the Collective Robotics Group at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, about collaborative coverage supervised by Alcherio Martinoli and Joel Burdick, and spent a term at Lunds Tekniska Högskola (Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden) as an exchange student at the Department of Automatic Control working with Rolf Johansson in 2002
Before moving to ETH Zuerich in 2000, Nikolaus studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Munich from 1998.
Selected Awards
- Best Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB), Osaka, Japan, 2008.
- Nominated for the 2008 EPFL Best PhD Thesis Award.
- Best Paper Award at the 8th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS), Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 2006.
- International Federation of Robotics Research (IFRR) Student Travel Fellowship Award at the 10th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2006.
Selected Media Coverage and Outreach
- I, robot - and gardener: MIT droid tend plants, by Melissa Trujillo, Associated Press, April 10, 2009.
- Robot Gardener Plants, Tends and Harvests, by Eric Bland, Discovery Channel News, April 8, 2009.
- In an Age of Robots, One to Clean the House? Still but a Dream, by Natalie Angier. New York Times, November 24, 2008.
- "Swarm Theory", by Peter Miller. National Geographic, July 2007, Washington, DC, USA.
- "Alice au pays des cafards / Wenn Kakerlaken Freunde werden", by Jean-Pierre Gibrat, 2006. 52min, Trans Europe Film, ARTE France/Germany, CNRS Images/Media.
- The inspection experiment was featured 10 days long running 20 robots for 10 hours a day at an exhibition "Consciences a l'oeuvre" taking place in a local museum in Lausanne during the swiss wide festival Science et Cite 2005 , organised every four years.
- More...