Alexander Schaefer

Alexander Schaefer is a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg, affiliated with the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group under Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard. His work focuses on robotics, particularly lidar-based localization, mapping, and sensor modeling for mobile and agricultural robots.

His research interests include autonomous navigation, 3D point cloud processing, sensor fusion, and agricultural robotics. He has made significant contributions to lidar-based mapping, change detection in dynamic environments, and the development of compact and differentiable map representations using cosine transforms.

The recent publications highlight a strong trend in urban and agricultural vehicle localization, robust sensor modeling, and probabilistic inference for robot navigation. His work frequently appears in top robotics conferences such as ICRA, IROS, and IEEE RA-L, often in collaboration with leading researchers in the field.

Alexander Schaefer has supervised several master's theses on topics including autonomous vehicle localization, multispectral soil mapping, and symmetry-based object detection in agricultural fields. He has also been involved in teaching, notably as a supervisor for the Robot Mapping lecture.

He has collaborated on research projects such as the Samsung Global Research Outreach Program and the EU project Flourish, focusing on robotic solutions for smart farming using the Bonirob platform. His work bridges academic research with real-world applications in autonomous systems.