Prof. Dr. Abhinav Valada Awarded at IROS Robotics Conference

Prof. Dr. Abhinav Valada has received the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Conference in Abu Dhabi, “for contributions to the advancement of robot learning”. The award recognizes researchers who are at an early stage of their career and have already made a big impact on research in the field of intelligent robots and systems.

The IROS Conference is one of the world’s largest conferences on robotics and presents the award annually to a researcher from this field. In 2024 the motto of the conference was ‘Robotics for Sustainable Development’.

Valada is a professor at the University of Freiburg, where he directs the Robot Learning Lab. He is a member of the Department of Computer Science and the BrainLinks-BrainTools Centre as well as a founding faculty of the ELLIS Unit Freiburg. In addition, he is a DFG Emmy Noether AI Fellow, a scholar of the ELLIS Society, and chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Learning.

His research focuses on topics at the intersection between robotics, machine learning, and computer vision. This includes fundamental problems of environmental perception in robots as well as state estimation and planning with the help of learning approaches that enable robots to operate reliably in complex and diverse domains. His goal is to develop scalable, lifelong robot learning systems.

The awards he has received for his research include the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, the NVIDIA Research Award, and the AutoSens Most Novel Research Award.