Lars Kunze BSc MSc PhD

Lars Kunze is a Full Professor in Safety for Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at UWE Bristol.

Prior to this, he was a Departmental Lecturer in Robotics in the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford (where he is now a Visiting Fellow). In the ORI, he leads the Cognitive Robotics Group (CRG).

He is also the Technical Lead at the Responsible Technology Institute (RTI), an international centre of excellence focused on responsible technology at Oxford University; and a Programme Fellow of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP) at York University. 

He is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at Christ Church and an Editor of both the Journal of Responsible Technology and the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence.

His areas of expertise lie in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). His goal is to enable robots to understand their surroundings, to act autonomously, and to explain their own behaviour in meaningful human terms. To this end, his research concerns the design and development of fundamental AI techniques for autonomous robot systems. He focusses on the combination of knowledge representation, reasoning, machine learning, and robot perception; motivated by applications in complex, real-world environments.

Lars studied Cognitive Science (BSc, 2006) and Computer Science (MSc, 2008) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and partly at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

He received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2014. During his PhD, Lars worked on methods for naive physics and common sense reasoning in the context of everyday robot manipulation. He contributed to several national, European and international projects including RoboHow, RoboEarth, and the PR2 Beta program.

In May 2013, Lars was appointed as a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science at Birmingham University.  Here he worked on qualitative spatio-temporal models for perception planning and knowledge-enabled perception, contributing to the European research projects STRANDS and ALOOF.

He was a visiting researcher in the JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, Japan (Summer 2011) and the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, US (Spring 2015).

See Lars’ Google Scholar profile.