Interview: Cyrill Stachniss’ View on AI in Agriculture

Cyrill Stachniss is a full professor at the University of Bonn and heads the Photogrammetry and Robotics Lab. He is additionally a Visiting Professor in Engineering at the University of Oxford and is with the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Before his appointment in Bonn, he was with the University of Freiburg and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. Since 2010, he has been a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow and received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2013. From 2015 to 2019, he was senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He is the spokesperson of the DFG Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob” at the University of Bonn, together with his colleague Heiner Kuhlmann. His research focuses on probabilistic techniques as well as learning approaches for mobile robotics, perception, and navigation. The main application areas of his research are autonomous service robots, agricultural robotics, and self-driving cars. He has co-authored over 300 publications and has coordinated multiple large-scale research projects on the national and European levels. Besides his university involvement, he cofounded three startups: Escarda Technologies, DeepUp, and PhenoInspect.