Since February 2007, I am a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg. I am working in the Autonomous Intelligent Systems Group headed by Wolfram Burgard. Before that, I earned my master degree in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam (see my curriculum).

My main interest are service robots that can help with everyday domestic manipulation tasks, such as cleaning, tidying up and setting the table. This requires the robot to perceive objects in the world, such as cups, plates, tables and doors, but also furniture like cupboards, and other machines like dish washers or micro wave ovens.

For my Ph.D., I work on the general problem of learning kinematic models for articulated objects. For this, I have developed a probabilistic framework that allows to model articulated objects, fit these models to observed data, evaluate these models and select the best one. For service robots in particular, examples of relevant articulated objects are doors, windows, cupboards, dishwashers, and micro wave ovens that the mobile manipulation robots need to operate. In general, articulated objects include all objects that consist of object parts that can be moved (or can move), like garage doors, sliding doors, cars, chairs, office lamps, and so on. For these kinds of objects, my approach can find the kinematic structure (i.e., the connectivity of the parts) and the kinematic properties (i.e., the link lengths, rotation axes, etc.). A free software implementation of my work is available in ROS in the articulation stack.

My research interests include learning kinematic models for articulated objects, learning body schemata for robots, learning by demonstration, and tactile sensing for robotics (see publications).

Jürgen Sturm University of Freiburg Department of Computer Science Autonomous Intelligent Systems Georges-Koehler-Allee 079 D-79110 Freiburg Germany Phone: +49 - 761 - 203-8010 Fax : +49 - 761 - 203-8007 Email: sturm {at} informatik.uni-freiburg {dot} de

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