Nikolaus Correll

Short Biography

After receiving his “Vordiplom” from the Technical University of Munich in 2000, Nikolaus graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) in spring 2003 (Dipl. Ing. ETH). During his master’s studies, he spent a term at Lunds Tekniska Högskola (Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden) as an exchange student at the Department of Automatic Control. Nikolaus wrote his master’s thesis at the Collective Robotics Group at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, about collaborative coverage.

After graduation, Nikolaus worked as a research assistant in the Collective Robotics Group at Caltech. Now, he is pursuing his graduate studies in Computer Science in the Swarm Intelligent Systems Group (SWIS). In summer 2005, Nikolaus participated at the 2nd EURON/GEOPLEX Summer School on Modeling and Control of Complex Dynamical Systems at the University of Bologna.

11/2007-            :Postdoctoral fellow, Distributed Robotics Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

10/2003-10/2007:PhD student in Computer, Communication, and Information Sciences, Swarm-Intelligent Systems Group, EPFL

05/2003-08/2003:Research Assistant, Collective Robotics Group, Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, California Institute of Technology

10/2000-03/2003:Masters in Electrical Engineering, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ)

10/1998-09/2000: Vordiplom in Electrical Engineering, Technische Universitaet Muenchen

Awards

  • Best Paper Award at the 8th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS), Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 2006.
  • International Federation of Robotics Research (IFRR) Student Travel Fellowship Award at the 10th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2006.

Media coverage and public appearance

Topics of Interest

My research interest is the design and analysis of swarm-intelligent systems, the modeling of their dynamics, and their implementation on real robotic platforms.

Paramount questions are how potentially intelligent collective behavior emerges out of the interaction of a large number of individuals, and how an individual needs to be designed in order to achieve a desired collective behavior.

I am also interested in contrasting self-organized approaches with classical deterministic approaches for multi-robot coordination.

Projects

Swarm Robotics: Distributed Boundary Coverage with a Swarm of Miniature Robots
Modeling of Mixed Artificial-Natural Societies
SwisTrack – Multi-Object Tracking Software for Robotics and Biology

Publications