I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT-SPARK Lab lead by Prof. Luca Carlone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working on hierarchical scene understanding in complex and dynamic environments.

Before that, I briefly was a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) lead by Prof. Roland Siegwart at ETH Zürich. I obtained my PhD in 2022 from ETH Zürich, working at ASL with Prof. Roland Siegwart, Dr. Cesar Cadena, Dr. Juan Nieto and in collaboration with the Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI Lab lead by Prof. Marc Pollefeys. For my thesis research I was awarded the ETH Medal for outstanding PhD Theses. Before that, I obtained my M.Sc. in Robotics, Systems, and Control (RSC) in 2019 also from ETH, which I graduated with distinction, and was awarded the Willi Studer Prize for the best graduate and the ETH Medal for outstanding master theses.

My main research interests lie in autonomy for intelligent mobile systems. In particular, I focus on active and passive perception and understanding of complex environments for robotic interaction and augmented reality. This includes building dense geometric and semantic representations of an environment, scene abstraction and understanding, lifelong learning and mapping, as well as active path planning to build these representations and abstractions autonomously and in unknown environments.

• Download Full CV (Updated 4/2024)

Selected Awards

• 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 Career Grant, 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 graduate in M.Sc. Robotics, Systems, and Control (RSC), 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 on the presented research, please reach out at lschmid@mit.edu! Selected previous talks:

• Khronos: From Volumetric Mapping to Spatio-Temporal Perception of Dynamic Scenes, presented at Mobile Robotics: Methods and Algorithms, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, 2024.
• Towards Fully Autonomous Actionable Perceptionof Shared Dynamic Scenes, presented at the Amazon Consumer Robotics Symposium, Amazon Lab126, Sunnyvale, CA, USA, 2024.
• Semantics and Learning for Active Robot Perception in Dynamic Environments, presented at the MIT Machine Learning Tea-talk Series, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2023.
• Robust Active Perception and Volumetric Mapping in Unknown Changing Environments, presented at the Joint Control and Robotics Seminar, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, 2022.
• Semantics and Learning for Robust Active Perception in Changing Environments, presented at the Semantic Perception Reading Group, Google Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, 2022.
• Robust Volumetric Mapping in Changing Environments, presented at the Microsoft Swiss Joint Research Center Workshop, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2022.
• Volumetric Mapping for Long-term Robot Interaction, presented at the Microsoft Swiss Joint Research Center Workshop, Virtual, 2021.
• A Modular Approach for Lifelong Mapping from End-User Data, presented at the Microsoft Swiss Joint Research Center Workshop, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2020.