Team

Core Faculty

Christian Bettstetter has been a professor at the University of Klagenfurt since 2005, where he leads the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems. His expertise is in wireless communications and self-organization in networked systems with applications in sensor networks and mobile robotics. He is founding scientific director of Lakeside Labs GmbH, a nonprofit research company focusing on self-organizing networked systems. Before joining Klagenfurt, Bettstetter was a research and teaching staff member in electrical and information engineering at TU München and senior researcher at DOCOMO Euro-Labs.

Hermann Hellwagner has been a professor in Klagenfurt since 1998, leading the Multimedia Communications group. His research areas are distributed multimedia systems, multimedia data communication, and the use of multimedia in challenged networks, e.g., among aerial robots and in emergency response situations. Earlier, he held positions as an associate professor at TU München and as a senior researcher at Siemens Corporate Research. He has received many research grants from national and European funding agencies as well as from industry. For many years, his research group has actively contributed to multimedia standardization within the Moving Picture Experts Group.

Bernhard Rinner is a professor at the University of Klagenfurt heading the Pervasive Computing group. Before joining Klagenfurt, he was with TU Graz and held research positions at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 and 1998/99. His current research interests include sensor networks, multi-robot systems and pervasive computing. He has authored and co-authored more than 200 papers, has led many research projects, and has served as a reviewer, program committee member, program chair and editor-in-chief. Bernhard Rinner is national speaker of the Erasmus Mundus doctoral school on Interactive and Cognitive Environments (ICE), chair of the doctoral advisory board of the Faculty of Technical Sciences, and member of the board of the Austrian Science Fund.

Andrea M. Tonello is professor and the chair of embedded communication systems at the University of Klagenfurt. His expertise and research domains span wireless and power line communications, systems theory, signal processing and electronics with application to future networks, smart grids, smart mobility and more recently to aerial robotics. He is a former associate professor of the University of Udine, Italy, and a technical manager of Bell Labs Lucent Technologies, USA.

Stephan Weiss has a research focus and expertise in state estimation/control and multi-sensor fusion for accurate navigation of resource-constrained aerial vehicles in 3D space. His algorithms for on-board visual-inertial navigation of micro helicopters were the first to enable autonomous flights of small aerial platforms in GPS-denied environments and continue to serve as benchmarks for newer approaches by international research groups. At NASA JPL, apart of leading research projects in his eld of expertise, he also successfully led interdisciplinary research projects in e.g. the area of precision agriculture. He is now continuing this interdisciplinary research at the University of Klagenfurt with two newly acquired FFG projects in the area of autonomous forest inventorying and precision agriculture. He continuously improved his skills in educating young researchers in his eld of expertise through supervision of various student projects and teaching parts of lectures at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology before starting his professorship in Klagenfurt.

Jan Steinbrener is an assistant professor (tenure track) at the Control of Networked Systems group. He obtained his PhD in Physics in 2010 from Stony Brook University, NY USA. Before joining the research group, he has held positions as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research, as a development engineer at Siemens Healthcare GmbH, and most recently as a senior scientist at CTR Carinthian Tech Research AG. His research focuses on combining state of the art machine learning methods with classical approaches in state estimation and control of autonomous systems.

Additional Faculty

Wilfried Elmenreich is an expert in smart grids and self-organizing systems. His knowledge in these fields perfectly complements the expertise in organizing multiple aerial vehicles in an autonomous and self-organizing fashion to fulfil best a given task.

Gerhard Friedrich is an expert in knowledge-based systems, knowledge acquisition, diagnosis and repair of processes as well as self-healing services.

Martin Hitz is an expert in multimedia user interaction, usability engineering, and human-computer interfaces.

Friedrike Wall is an expert in agent based simulations, information quality and validation, and agent based decision behavior analysis in the field of controlling and strategic business management.

Senior Researchers

Aymen Fakhreddine is a senior researcher with expertise in wireless communications, networking, and localization. His current emphasis is on cellular-connected drone systems. He holds a doctoral and master degree in telematic engineering from the University Carlos III Madrid (Spain) and a master degree in wireless communication systems from École Supérieure d’Électricité (Centrale Supélec) in Paris (France). Before joining Bettstetter’s team at the University of Klagenfurt, he was a researcher at IMDEA Networks and a visiting student at Singapore University of Technology and Design.

Evsen Yanmaz is a senior researcher at Lakeside Labs. Previously, she held positions as a senior researcher at NES Institute at the University of Klagenfurt, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include self-organizing networks, cooperative wireless networks, and communication and coordination of aerial networks.

Rupam Singh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Control of Networked Systems group.

Doctoral Students

• Eren Allak — Visual-inertial odometry with global nonGaussian uncertainty
• Christoph Böhm — Observability aware state estimation and motion planning in the presence of uncertainty
• Christian Brommer — Modular multi-sensor fusion for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation
• Alessandro Fornasier — Invariant/equivariant consistent multi-sensor multi-robot fusion
• Markus Gutmann — Dynamic deployment of UAV swarms
• Alexander Hardt-Stremayr — Dense real-time visual-inertial odometry
• Roland Jung — Collaborative autonomous navigation and state estimation in UAV swarms
• Kyriakos Lite — Localization and navigation in multi-robot systems
• Mohammad Rahmani — Self-aware decision making in multi-robot systems
• Martin Scheiber —Modular Control for Aggressive and Time-Optimal Robot Maneuvers
• Rohit Dhakate — Reinforcement Learning-based Autonomous Control of Robotic Systems
• Visar Arapi —State estimation with AI methods for medical robotics
• Thomas Jantos — AI- and Image-based 6D Object Pose Estimation for Statistical State Estimation for UAVs
• Jan Michalczyk — Consistent Aerial Radar-based Navigation In Visibility challenged Areas and Landscapes

Staff Member

• Fred Arneitz — Dronehall administration and maintenance, drone hardware administration and modification, and IT infrastructure services and maintenance.
• Hermann Zunter — IT infrastructure services and maintenance.

Alumni

Doctoral Graduates

• Agata Barciś (2021)— Synchronizing and Swarming Robots. Spatio-Temporal Coordination in Multi-Robot Systems
• Michał Barciś (2021) — Information Distribution in Multi-Robot Systems
• Petra Mazdin (2021)— Communication-Aware Multi-Robot Coordination for Simultaneous Coverage
• Babak Salamat (2021)— Dynamics, path planning and control of UAVs
• Micha Sende (2021) — Energy-Aware Exploration with Autonomous Robot Teams
• Samira Hayat (2021)— Mission-specific aerial network design
• Pasquale Grippa (2020) — Drone-based delivery systems
• Jürgen Scherer (2020) — Multi-robot persistent surveillance with connectivity constraints
• Omair Sarwar (2019) — Facial privacy protection in airborne recreational videography
• Ekaterina Peshkova (2017) — Multimodal interaction for semi automatic flock control
• Raheeb Muzaffar (2016)— Routing and video streaming in drone networks
• Torsten Andre (2015) — Autonomous exploration by robot teams: Coordination, communication, and collaboration
• Asif Khan (2015) — Coordinated unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance of targets
• Vera Mersheeva (2015) — UAV routing problem for area monitoring in a disaster situation
• Daniel Wischounig-Strucl (2013) — Resource aware and incremental mosaics of wide areas from small-Scale UAVs
• Saeed Yahyanejad (2013) — Orthorectified mosaicking of images from small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles

Senior Researchers

• Markus Quaritsch (2008–12) — Technical coordinator of cDrones
• Robert Kuschnig (2009–12) — System integration and wireless networking
• Vladimir Vukadinovic (2014–15) — Video streaming
• Raheeb Muzaffar (2016–2020) — Video streaming

Other Former Staff Members

• Severin Kacianka
• Tahir Habib Nawaz
• Emil Stojanovski
• Roland Tusch