Nikolaus Correll

Nikolaus Correll (born 1977 in Munich, Germany) is a roboticist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Department of Computer Science with courtesy appointments in the departments of Aerospace, Electrical and Materials Engineering. He is also the founder and CTO of Robotic Materials Inc..

Correll obtained a Diploma (Masters) in Electrical Engineering from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich. He spent the first two years of his studies at the Technische Hochschule München, participated in the Erasmus Programme to spend a semester at Lunds Tekniska Hogsköla working with Rolf Johansson and wrote his Diploma thesis at Caltech working with Alcherio Martinoli and Joel Burdick.

Correll received his Dr. és science (Phd) degree in Computer Science in 2007 at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) working under Alcherio Martinoli. Correll did a post-doc with Prof. Daniela Rus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He became an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007.

Correll is the recipient of a 2012 NSF CAREER award, the 2012 NASA Early Career Faculty Fellowship, and a 2016 Provost Faculty Achievement Award. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Correll's research is on Swarm Robotics, Swarm Intelligence, and Self-organization. He is using these concepts to equip composite materials with intelligence and enabling robots with autonomy, for which he coined the term Robotic Materials and founded a company of the same name, which markets robotic tactile sensors.

Correll is also an active researcher in robotics education and is the author of an open-source, collaborative textbook "Introduction to Autonomous Robots".

Correll's work on robotic materials has received worldwide media attention including the Associated Press, Neue Zuercher Zeitung, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and Popular Science, among others.

• Plenary speaker at the Int. Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS), 2016
• Best Paper Award at the 3rd Conference on System-integrated Intelligence (SysInt), 2016
• Best Paper Award at the Int. Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) 2006 and 2014
• NSF CAREER award 2012
• NASA Early Career Faculty Fellowship 2012
• Best Paper Award at the Int. Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB), 2008