Short Bio

Angela Schoellig is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Technical University of Munich. She is a member of the Board of Directors at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) and serves as the Coordinator of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG). Before moving to Munich in 2022, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, and a Faculty Member of the Vector Institute for AI. Angela conducts research at the intersection of robotics, controls, and machine learning. Her goal is to enhance the performance, safety, and autonomy of robots by enabling them to learn from past experiments and from each other. Angela has held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Machine Learning for Robotics & Control and a Canada CIFAR Chair in AI. She has also been a principal investigator of the NSERC Canadian Robotics Network. Angela is the recipient of an NSERC Arthur B. McDonald Fellowship (2022), the Robotics: Science and Systems Early Career Spotlight Award (2019), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2017), and an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2017). She is a Curious Minds Award winner (2022), an MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 (2017), a Canada Science Leadership Program Fellow (2014), and one of Robohub’s “25 women in robotics you need to know about” (2013). Her team is the four-time winner of the North American SAE AutoDrive Challenge (2018-21). Angela’s PhD at ETH Zurich (2013) was awarded the ETH Medal and the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award. She holds an M.Sc. in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart (2008) and an M.Sc. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2007).

Robotics Control Theory Machine Learning Dynamic Systems Quadrotors Self-Driving Vehicles

 
Download my  full CV and  head-shot image.

 

Publications

My list of publications is available here and on  Google Scholar.

 

Selected Awards and Honors

• NSERC Arthur B. McDonald Fellowship, 2022.
• Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, 2020.
• First Place Four Times in the North American SAE AutoDrive Challenge, 2018-2021.
• Canada CIFAR AI Chair, 2019.
• RSS Early Career Spotlight Award, 2019.
• Canada Research Chair (Tier 2), 2018.
• MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 (Technology Review article, University of Toronto news, CBC interview), 2017.
• Sloan Research Fellowship, 2017
• Ministry of Research, Innovation & Science Early Researcher Award, 2017.
• Nominated for a Canada Research Chair Tier 2, 2017.
• Connaught New Researcher Award, 2015.
• MIT Enabling Society Tech Competition First Prize, 2015.
• $1M Drones For Good Competition Finalist, 2015.
  
• IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Video Clip Contest Finalist (with this video), 2014.
• Best Robotics Paper Award at the Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) (with this paper), 2014.
• Science Leadership Program Fellow, 2014.
• Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Prize (as one of 35 worldwide, for my PhD thesis), 2013.
• ETH Medal (awarded to the top 8% of Ph.D. dissertations at ETH Zurich, for my PhD thesis), 2013.
• Named one of “25 women in robotics you need to know about” by Robohub.org, 2013.
• Professor-Peter-Sagirow Award (for outstanding performance in the undergraduate program Engineering Cybernetics, awarded to the top two students out of 70), 2005.

Ongoing Activities

• Affiliations:
  • Coordinator of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG), since 2024.
  • Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in reliable AI (relAI), since 2024.
  • Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), since 2024.
  • Industry & International Relations Director of the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), since 2022.
  • University of Toronto Robotics Institute, since 2018.
  • Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, since 2018.
  • NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network (NCFRN), since 2018.
  • Associate Director of the Centre for Aerial Robotics Research and Education (CARRE), since 2015.
  • Principal Faculty Advisor for the University of Toronto’s SAE/GM AutoDrive Challenge team competing in a 3-year self-driving competition, since 2017.
  • Faculty Advisor of the University of Toronto Aerospace Team (UTAT), since 2015.
  • Affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics and the Lassonde Institute for Mining, since 2014.
• Organizing activities:
  • Organizer of the Invited Session on Learning-based Control at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, since 2016.
  • Organizer of the RSS Workshop on Semantics for Robotics: From Environment Understanding and Reasoning to Safe Interaction, 2024.
  • Program Chair of the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023.
  • Organizer of the CDC Workshop on Benchmarking, Reproducibility, and Open-Source Code in Controls, 2023.
  • Organizer of the IROS Safe Robot Learning Competition, 2022.
  • Organizer of the ICRA Workshop on Releasing Robots into the Wild: Simulations, Benchmarks & Deployment, 2022.
  • Organizer of the NeurIPS Workshop on Deployable Decision Making in Embodied Systems, 2021.
  • Organizer of the IROS Workshop on Safe Real-World Robot Autonomy, 2021.
  • Organizer of the IROS Workshop on Evaluating the Broader Impacts of Self-Driving Cars, 2021.
  • Organizer of the RSS Workshop on Robotics for People: Perspectives on Interaction, Learning and Safety, 2021.
  • Organizer of the Aerial Robotics Seminar Series at the University of Toronto (see Events here), since 2016.
  • Organizer of the Aerial Robotics International Research Symposium, Jun 21-22, 2017.
• Editor positions:
  • IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics (T-FR) (formerly Field Robotics), Editorial Board Member, since 2021.
  • Associate Editor of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), since 2018.
  • Associate Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), since 2017.
  • Chair of Jury of the IEEE Control Systems Society Video Clip Contest, 2017.
  • Area Chair for the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), 2017.