Wolfram Burgard's lab in Freiburg

Today I visited Wolfram Burgard's lab in Freiburg Germany. There are numerous interesting projects going on there, including work on range estimation from video and range data, and modeling of robot kinematics using Gaussian processes (the latter was the subject of a recent paper at RSS). They also have several interesting implementation projects running, including an automated blimp, and automated helicopter, and several types of vehicles.

I also gave a talk there whose primary focus was our own underwater and amphibious robotics work at McGill. Unfortunately, the display system would not recognize my older Powerbook, and as a result the 1-hour talk started a half -hour late. This was a new experience for me. This got me totally stressed out and led to a very uncomfortable talk for me. That said, the visit was very pleasant, interesting and enriching.

Students doing a demo of a robot for exploring and building