Biography

Auke Ijspeert is a full professor at the EPFL, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL, and at the University of Southern California (USC). He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL as an SNF assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in October 2009 and to full professor in April 2016. His primary affiliation is with the Institute of Bioengineering, and secondary affiliation with the Institute of Mechanical Engineering.

His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of sensorimotor coordination in animals, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics. With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, and CLAWAR 2015. He is member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, and associate editor for Soft Robotics and for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has acted as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2009-2013) and as a guest editor for the Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and Biological Cybernetics. He is/was the Technical Program Chair of 6 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006, SSRR2016), and has been a program committee member of over 50 conferences. See longer CV.

CURRENT WORK

Locomotion control in natural and artificial systems: Using robots for testing neurobiological models
RobotCub: European project on humanoid robotics, see www.robotcub.org
Roombots: Modular robotics for adaptive and self-organizing furniture
Lampetra: Life-like Artefacts for Motor-Postural Experiments and Development of New Control Technologies inspired by Rapid Animal locomotion

For more projects see: http://biorob.epfl.ch

Auke Ijspeert's research is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Commission, the EPFL, the French Ministry for Research and Technology, and Microsoft Research Cambridge.
Past funding: US National Science Foundation, European Space Agency, Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI).