I am a mechatronics engineer with a passion for quadruped robots.
My professional goal is to design and build high performance robotic systems for research.

I joined the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen in 2013.
As a member of the Robotics Central Scientific Facility and the manager of the Robot Lab in Tübingen I provide technical support to the researchers at our institute. That includes designing and building robots as well as operating and maintaining our 3d printers, motion capture systems and experimental setups.

In the last couple of years we developed a light-weight, low cost, minimal complexity, torque-controlled actuator module for robotic research.
This work has been fully open-sourced under the Open Dynamic Robot Initiative.

From 2007 to 2012 I worked at the Robotics Innovation Center in Bremen which is part of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.
During my time there I helped to develop, build and test several mobile robot systems:

• Asguard II, Asguard III and Asguard IV – mobile security platforms with star-shaped wheels
• Cesar – a crater exploration robot for the ESA Lunar Robotics Challenge
• Charlie – a quadruped robot using brushless actuation
• Magnet Crawler – a magnetic climbing robot for marine inspection 

From 2003 to 2006 I worked for Boston Dynamics in Cambridge, USA.
In this time we developed and excessively tested several versions of the autonomous quadruped robot BigDog.
I worked on the leg design, custom hydraulic system design and supported the indoor and outdoor robot experiments.