About Me
A brief overview of my academic bio, full CV, selected awards, recognitions, and invited talks, as well as personal interests.
Biography
Lukas Schmid is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the MIT SPARK Lab lead by Prof. Luca Carlone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before that, he briefly was a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) lead by Prof. Roland Siegwart at ETH Zürich. He earned his PhD in 2022 from ETH Zürich, advised by Prof. Roland Siegwart, Dr. Cesar Cadena, and Dr. Juan Nieto, where he also obtained his M.Sc. in Robotics, Systems, and Control (RSC) in 2019. During his PhD, he was a visiting researcher at the Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI Lab lead by Prof. Marc Pollefeys.
His work has been recognized with several awards and honors, including the Outstanding Systems Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), the ETH Medal for outstanding PhD theses, the ETH Medal for outstanding master theses, the Willi Studer Prize for the best graduate of the year at ETH, the first place in the 2024 Hilti SLAM challenge, and a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoc-mobility fellowship.
His main research interests is in autonomy for intelligent mobile systems, where he focuses on active and passive 3D perception and understanding of complex, dynamic, and changing environments for robotic interaction and augmented reality. This includes research on dense geometric and semantic scene representations, scene abstraction and understanding, as well as detection and prediction of moving and changing entities. He complements this with research on lifelong learning and mapping, as well as active path planning to build these representations autonomously in unknown environments and enable continuous improvement of a robot's scene model and perception capabilities. While his work is grounded in rigorous theory, his methods are demonstrated on-board fully autonomous mobile robots and drones in complex real-world scenarios.
Awards and Recognitions
Selected awards and recognitions:- RSS: Pioneer at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2025.
- Outstanding Systems Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) for our work on Khronos, 2024.
- First Place in the "Nothing Stands Still" 2024 Hilti SLAM challenge on spatio-temporal registration, 2024.
- ETH Medal for Outstanding PhD Thesis awarded by ETH Zürich for the outstanding research of my thesis "Robust Active Perception and Volumetric Mapping in Unknown Changing Environments", 2023.
- Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc-Mobility Fellowship for the project "Robust Robotic Scene Understanding in Complex, Changing Environments using 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs", 2022.
- Willi Studer Prize awarded by ETH Zürich for the best M.Sc. graduate, 2020.
- ETH Medal for Outstanding Master Thesis awarded by ETH Zürich for my thesis "Active Path Planning for 3D Reconstruction with UAVs", 2020.
Invited Talks
If you would like me to give a talk please reach out to lschmid@mit.edu! Selected previous talks:
Personal Interests
Besides my work, I am a passionate classical pianist (four times winner of the 1st prize at the Thurgau Youth Music Competition, three times with award), but also used to play in piano trios and jazz ensembles.
I enjoy team sports such as volleyball, especially beach volleyball during summer, working out, and running. I also used to play Tennis and spent many years doing Wing Chun Kung Fu.
I love exploring, tasting, and presenting wines and making cocktails (WSET Level 2 Award in Wines, WSET Level 2 Award in Spirits, both passed with distinction), and sharing these experiences with others.
For recreation, I relish various water sports such as scuba diving (PADI Advanced Open Water Diver), sailing (Swiss Yachting Certificate, MIT provisional, 420, laser, windsurf, and lynx catboat rating) as well as wave, wake, and wind surfing.