Our New MaD Man – Lukas Schmidt

Lukas has been interested in robotics and autonomous systems for as long as he can remember. He has studied Mechatronics and Computer Science at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, studying design, control, perception, and decision-making for autonomous systems. In his Bachelor thesis, Lukas used drones to automatically capture images that can be used to reconstruct archaeological sites in 3D. In his masters, he went from systems engineering to modern computer vision algorithms, machine and deep learning, and discovered his interest in explainability and visualization techniques for these methods. During his master thesis on trajectory prediction with LSTMs, Lukas got to know the Fraunhofer IIS, where he works as research staff now.
Lukas joins the MaD-Lab as a PhD Candidate in 2021. His research is geared towards safety and explainability for reinforcement learning, combining a lot of his prior interests on perception, decision making, and learning.