Lara joined the ORI as a DPhil student in October 2021 as part of the GOALS group, supervised by Prof. Nick Hawes. Her academic interests lie in real-time robot motion planning and risk-aware methods for robot autonomy under uncertainty. Her research spans across the fields of probabilistic planning, control, optimization and learning. It includes the development of novel methods for robot motion planning and control that enable robots to operate safely in complex and dynamic environments with humans while still being task-efficient.
Prior to joining the ORI, Lara graduated from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) with an MSc. in "Robotics, Cognition, Intelligence". Over the course of her master's degree, she spent one year at EPFL in Lausanne. First, for an exchange semester and consecutively for her master's thesis supervised by Prof. Aude Billard on 3D scene understanding in dynamic crowded environments. She later collaborated with Prof. Sylvain Calinon as part of the Robot Learning and Interaction Group at the IDIAP research institute on motion planning in complex multi-contact environments. Additionally, during her studies in Munich, Lara worked as a software engineer at the mobile robotics startup Magazino in Munich.
Outside of research, Lara loves being outdoors, preferably on rocks climbing, on water sailing or on snow skiing.
You can find her personal page here: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~larab/
