ALIN ALBU-SCHAEFFER, Germany 

Alin Albu-Schaeffer (M’07-SM’13-F’16) M.S. ’93 in electrical engineering, Timisoara, Romania; Ph.D. ’02 in automatic control, Munich, Germany. Since 2012 he is heading the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which he joined in 1995. He is full professor at TU Munich, Computer Science Department. Research interests include robot design, modeling and control, flexible and variable compliance joints, human-robot interaction, bio-inspired robots, neuroscience. He coauthored over 200 papers with an h-index of 62 (google scholar). He received the TRO Best Paper Award in 2012 and 2014 and several ICRA and IROS Best Paper Awards. He centrally contributed to the development of the DLR-light-weight robot and its tech-transfer to KUKA, initiating a paradigm shift towards collaborative industrial robotics. He contributed to the MIRO surgical robot and its licensing to Medtronic. Alin participated to more than ten EU-projects, in two as coordinator. In 2019 he received the ERC Advanced Grant M-Runners.

IEEE Activities: COMMITTEE/BOARDS: 

• IEEE Fellow Evaluation Board
• IEEE Fellow Nomination Board
• EU-Robotics Board of Directors Member for two election terms, 2012-2016
• Coordinator of the VDI/VDE group „Robot Control“; Organization of the annual German Robot Control Symposium

SOCIETY:

Since 2016 IEEE Fellow (IEEE Member since 2009) 2008 – 2012 Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics 2014 – Member of the German Society of Robotics, Germany, Board member 2009-2011 2012 – Founding Member of EU-Robotics

CONFERENCES:

2018 Organizing Committee, IEEE Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2016 Program Co-Chair, IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2010, 2011 Area Chair, Robotics Science and Systems 2011 Regional Chair, Int. Conf. on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence, Korea 2005 Program Committee Member, IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation 2008, 2009 Program Committee Member, Robotics Science and Systems 2011, ’15, ‘20 Program Committee Member, Humanoids

Qualifications:

During my activity as a board of directors member of the EU-Robotics organization within two election terms I was involved in the conference board, in defining the strategic focus and orientation of the robotics association, initiating and implementing technical topic groups, and in interfacing with the EU administration and with politics.

Major Accomplishments: 

• IEEE Conference Organization activities
• Defining the Robotics Research Roadmap and the Research Agenda within the EU-Robotics Board of Directors
• Initiating and organizing technical topic groups and founding the Mechatronics Topics Group

Position Statement:

The major aspects I would like to engage in as an AdCom member for serving the IEEE RAS community are:

• Identifying the major chances, trends, and needs in robotics and automation and shape the topics and the focus of our conferences and journals.
• Managing the continuous growth of the RAS and the related challenges in terms of conference organization, communication, and society administration
• Support and pursue the developments in the publication strategy of the last years towards faster and wider journal publication coverage. The foundation of RA-L and its interaction with the RAS conferences is a major achievement of the last years. Still, this young process needs further development, fine-tuning, and optimization.
• Promote in a balanced way, both highly innovative research on academic level and the materialization of current research results into new products and markets through technology transfer. My personal and my institute’s activity focuses, in addition to academic research, to a large extent also on tech-transfer and generation of spin-offs. So I consider myself to be a good interface between academic research, applied research, and industry.
• To contribute to a transparent decision process with effective society participation at large.