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Robot Learning Lab

The Robot Learning Lab headed by Prof. Dr. Abhinav Valada is part of the Department of Computer Science, the BrainLinks-BrainTools center, and the ELLIS unit Freiburg. We seek to advance the foundations of robot perception, state estimation, and planning using learning approaches to enable robots to operate reliably in more complex domains and diverse environments. Our focus is to develop scalable lifelong robot learning systems that continuously learn multiple tasks from what they perceive using a diverse set of modalities and experience by interacting with the real world.

Explore our research on YouTube and our open-source code on GitHub.

lab

News:

17.10.2024 Our work on BEVCar: Camera-Radar Fusion for BEV Map and Object Segmentation by J. Schramm, N. Vödisch, K. Petek, B.R. Kiran, S. Yogamani, W. Burgard, and A. Valada won the IROS Best Paper on Cognitive Robotics and was a finalist for the IROS Best Student Paper Award.
17.10.2024 Abhinav Valada received the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award "for contributions to the advancement of robot learning".
14.10.2024 Our work on Taxonomy-Aware Continual Semantic Segmentation by Julia Hindel, Daniele Cattaneo, and Abhinav Valada won the Outstanding Workshop Presentation Award at IROS Workshop on Long-Term Perception for Autonomy in Dynamic Human-shared Environments.
14.10.2023 We are co-organizing the Workshop on Label Efficient Learning Paradigms for Autonomy at Scale and the Workshop on Interaction-aware Autonomous Systems at IROS 2024.
14.07.2024 Niclas Vödisch was selected for RSS Pioneers recognizing world's top early career researchers in robotics.
16.05.2024 Our work on Bayesian Scene Keypoints for Deep Policy Learning in Robotic Manipulation by J.O. Von Hartz, E. Chisari, T. Welschehold, W. Burgard, J. Boedecker, and A. Valada was awarded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention.
03.05.2024 Daniel Honerkamp, Tim Welschehold, and Abhinav Valada were awarded the third place at the Future Prize (Zukunftspreis) for their work on "Neural Navigation for Mobile Manipulation".
01.08.2023 Abhinav Valada was appointed Full Professor, Chair of Autonomous Intelligent Systems.
01.06.2023 Abhinav Valada received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation "for contributions to learning and perception for robot navigation".
20.01.2023 Abhinav Valada conferred Honorary Professorship at Amity University.
23.10.2022 D. Honerkamp, T. Welschehold, and A. Valada won the Best Paper Award for their work on Learning Navigation for Arbitrary Mobile Manipulation Motions in Unseen and Dynamic Environments at the IROS 2022 Workshop on Mobile Manipulation and Embodied Intelligence.
13.08.2022 Rohit Mohan and Abhinav Valada won the Most Innovative Research Award for their work on "Amodal Panoptic Segmentation" at the AutoSens 2022 conference.
25.04.2022 Abhinav Valada receives the NVIDIA Research Award.
22.04.2022 We are co-organizing the Workshop on Perception and Navigation for Autonomous Robotics in Unstructured and Dynamic Environments and the Tutorial on Open and Trustworthy Deep Learning for Robotics at IROS 2022.
03.02.2022 We are co-organizing the Workshop on 3D-Deep Learning for Automated Driving at IV 2022.
14.12.2021 Abhinav Valada was awarded an AI grant and accepted into the renowned Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
13.12.2021 The University of Freiburg features our work on holistic scene understanding for automated vehicles in the online magazine.
15.10.2021 We are co-organizing the AI Driving Olympics at NeurIPS 2021.
20.06.2021 Abdelrahman Younes, Daniel Honerkamp, Tim Welschehold, and Abhinav Valada won the Embodied AI SoundSpaces Challenge at CVPR 2021.
01.04.2021 We are co-organizing workshops on 3D-Deep Learning for Automated Driving and Scene Understanding in Unstructured Environments .
24.02.2021 Abhinav Valada is appointed as Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Robot Learning.
10.12.2020 Abhinav Valada received the Silver in the AutoSens 2020 Vision Award for being a visionary and inspiring progress throughout the vehicle perception ecosystem.
30.11.2020 Abhinav Valada was elected as a Scholar of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Society.
28.08.2020 The lightweight EfficientPS by Rohit Mohan and Abhinav Valada wins the Robust Vision Challenge 2020 Panoptic Segmentation Track, that was held in conjunction with ECCV2020.
30.07.2020 Robot Learning Lab gets support from the Eva Mayr-Stihl Stiftung through a research grant.
10.05.2020 Our EfficientPS is ranked #1 for panoptic segmentation on the popularly challenging Cityscapes benchmark leaderboard and advances the state-of-the-art on KITTI, Mapillary Vistas, and IDD.
04.03.2020 We are organizing a workshop on Self-Supervised Robot Learning at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS’2020).
15.01.2020 We are co-organizing a workshop on 3D-Deep Learning for Automated Driving at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV’2020).
19.12.2019 Abhinav Valada becomes a member of the BrainLinks-BrainTools center, funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics, Science and Arts of Baden-Württemberg.
11.12.2019 The University of Freiburg was selected as one of 17 ELLIS centers of excellence in machine learning in Europe. Abhinav Valada is a faculty in the newly established Freiburg unit.
01.08.2019 Abhinav Valada will serve as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) journal.