I am currently pursuing a PhD degree at the IAS group at Technical University of Munich.

I have started my PhD studies in 2008, however I was working at the chair during my under graduate studies in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering / Mechatronics before that, and wrote my diploma thesis on "Efficient Detection of Primitive Geometric Shapes in 3D Point Clouds" during this time.

From February to April 2009, I was a visiting scholar in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the Personal Robotics group of Intel Labs Pittsburgh, where I was working with Siddartha Srinivasa on 3D perception for personal robots.

Research Topics

• Model Fitting

• Semantic Mapping

• 3D Geometric Reasoning

• Laser Segmentation

Current Research Projects

• EnvMod : We focus on point cloud based representation and reasoning techniques for building accurate and meaningful 3D maps for mobile robots in both indoor and outdoor environments. One of our main application and deployment scenario is the Assistive Kitchen. However, all our methods were carefully crafted with generality in mind, therefore they have been also successfully applied to outdoor urban, aerial, and underwater datasets.

• CoP : The project aims at the unification of vision-based sensing in the CoP (Cognitive Perception) in the learning and planning system. On the one hand, CoP manages the interpretation of different kinds of sensors and on the other hand it automatically acquires and maintains the knowledge about the world and objects in the world. CoP selects sensors and sensor interpretation algorithms based on their expected utility. To this end, CoP learns and improves intersensor and inter-algorithmic models for method seleciton from experience. Especially the vision system, the major sensor we use, provides several automatic model improving techniques. Improved models accelerate the perception process and provide more robust results.

Selected Publications

• Radu Bogdan Rusu , Zoltan-Csaba Marton , Nico Blodow , Mihai Emanuel Dolha , Michael Beetz , Towards 3D Point Cloud Based Object Maps for Household Environments, 2008, Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal (Special Issue on Semantic Knowledge),

  (BibTeX) (PDF)

• Nico Blodow , Radu Bogdan Rusu , Zoltan-Csaba Marton , Michael Beetz , Partial View Modeling and Validation in 3D Laser Scans for Grasping, 2009, 9th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids),

  (BibTeX) (PDF)