Field of Work
At FRPG, we study vision-based perception and autonomous control of robots. In particular, aerial and ground robots. Multi-robot systems form the backbone of our research. We study both centralized and distributed perception and control of robots in a team performing cooperative tasks. We especially focus on the intertwining of perception and autonomous control in this context. In the area of computer vision, we have pioneered new methods for animal and human motion capture (MoCap). MoCap means estimation of pose and shape of a subject. At FRPG, we specifically focus on animal and human MoCap methods that can run on-board autonomous robots deployed in outdoor, unknown and unstructured environments. These include, for example, methods for MoCap of wild animals in their natural habitat.
At FRPG, we also investigate reinforcement learning (RL) based methods for aerial robot control for tasks such as navigation and autonomous landing. A special emphasis is put on developing hybrid approaches combining RL and classical control to preserve stability properties. Another key focus is on interpretability of the RL policy and hyper-parameter selection. Finally, we also focus on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). SLAM is one of the most fundamental and classical topics in robotics. At FRPG, we study SLAM from the lens of combining perception with action -- which in literature is referred as 'active SLAM'. We focus on both novel methodological (algorithmic) and system-focused approaches for active SLAM .
Personal Information
Aamir Ahmad leads the Flight Robotics and Perception Group (FRPG) at the University of Stuttgart. He is deputy director (research) of the Institute of Flight Mechanics and Controls (IFR) at the University of Stuttgart and tenure-track professor (chair 'Flugrobotik'). He is also a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, where he was previously a research scientist (2016–2020). His main research focus is on perception and control in multi-robot systems, with a particular emphasis on autonomous aerial robots. He has attracted research funding from the European Commission (H2020), Cyber Valley and Max Planck Institute's Grassroots program. In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious Marie-Curie Intra-European Fellowship, following which, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen (2014–2016). He obtained his PhD (awarded with merit), from the University of Lisbon, Portugal in 2013 and B-Tech (Honours) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (2008).
Ahmads publications at the IEEE European Conference on Mobile Robotics have twice (2011, 2015) received the top-ten paper award. He is currently serving as an associate editor of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).