Olov Andersson

I am an Assistant Professor and WASP Fellow in AI for Autonomous Systems, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation as of October 1, 2023.

Interests:

• Embodied AI for Autonomous Robots and Vehicles: How to leverage recent advances in AI (e.g. VLM, LLM, ...) for improved autonomy. Enabling mobile robots to better understand the world to efficiently navigate and carry out everyday tasks. For a sample of our work, check out OneMap.
• Full-stack Autonomy in the Real-World: planning, mapping and navigation addressing the challenges of dynamic, uncertain environments.

Group members:

• Timon Homberger (PhD Student)
• Finn Lukas Busch (PhD Student)
• Dr. Quantao Yang (Postdoc)
• Jesús Peimbert (Research engineer)
• Dr. Truls Nyberg (Postdoc)
• Jesper Eriksson (PhD student)

Background:

Previously (2020-2023), I was a senior researcher in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich under Prof. Roland Siegwart. There I supervised multiple PhD students and projects. Among other things I was:

• On the winning team of the DARPA SubT Challenge (helped lead ASL's part of the winning team CERBERUS) and supervised development of a new autonomous long-range drone for unknown 3D environments.
  Washington Post "The $82 Million Super Bowl of Robots": https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/11/10/darpa-robot-competition/
• Lead an ArmaSuisse project on a flying metal detector concept (e.g., humanitarian de-mining). Got picked up in IEEE Spectrum here.
• Lead the mobile manipulation part in EU H2020 project Heron for robotic road repair.

News:

October 15, 2024. Co-chaired a workshop on robot perception in dynamic environments at IROS'24 in Abu Dhabi with leading reserachers from MIT, ETHZ, Stanford, Google and Amazon. Thanks to everybody who joined us there! Some nice coverage by the Robotics Automation Society.

December 8, 2023. Got a chance to talk about the potential of AI robots with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson when he visited KTH and Danica Kragic as part of his AI initiative. https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2023/12/statsministern-och-civilministern-besoker-kth/