Abhinav Valada is a Full Professor at the
University of Freiburg,
where
he directs the Robot Learning Lab. He is a
member of the Department of
Computer Science, the BrainLinks-BrainTools
center, and a founding
faculty of the ELLIS Unit Freiburg. Abhinav is a
DFG Emmy Noether AI
Fellow, Scholar of the ELLIS Society, and Chair
of the IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society Technical Committee on Robot
Learning. He received
his Ph.D. with distinction from the University
of Freiburg and his M.S.
in Robotics from The Robotics Institute of
Carnegie Mellon University.
Abhinav’s research lies at the intersection of
robotics, machine
learning, and computer vision with a focus on
tackling fundamental robot
perception, state estimation, and planning
problems to enable robots to
operate reliably in complex and diverse domains.
For his research, he
received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in
Robotics and Automation,
IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award,
NVIDIA Research Award,
among others. Many aspects of his research have
been prominently
featured in wider media such as the Discovery
Channel, NBC News,
Business Times, and The Economic Times.
