Alin Albu-Schäffer

Alin Albu-Schäffer received the M.S. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Timisoara, Romania in 1993 and the Ph.D. in automatic control from the Technical University of Munich in 2002. Since 2012 he is the head of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which he joined in 1995. Moreover, he is a professor at the Technical University of Munich, holding the Chair for "Sensor Based Robotic Systems and Intelligent Assistance Systems". His research interests range from robot design and control to robot intelligence and human neuroscience. He centrally contributed to the development of the DLR-light-weight robot and its technology transfer to the KUKA company, leading to a paradigm shift in industrial robot applications towards light-weight, sensitive and interactive robotics. Alin Albu-Schäffer was as well strongly involved in the development of the MIRO surgical robot system and its commercialization through technology transfer to Covidien/Medtronic, the worldwide largest medical devices manufacturer. He is author of more than 270 peer reviewed journal and conference papers and received several awards, including the IEEE King-Sun Fu Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics in 2012 and 2014, the EU-Robotics Technology Transfer Award in 2011, several Best Paper Awards at the major IEEE Robotics Conferences as well as the DLR Science Award. In 2019 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project M-Runner, about energy efficient locomotion based on nonlinear mechanical resonance principles. He is an IEEE Fellow since 2018.