Georges Giralt PhD Award for Ribin Balachandran
Ribin Balachandran received the prestigious Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best doctoral thesis in robotics in Europe. The PhD thesis entitled "A Stable and Transparent Framework for Adaptive Shared Control of Robots" was written in the Analysis and Control of Complex Robotic Systems department. The doctoral thesis was completed at the Technical University of Munich. A significant part of the PhD was developed within the Aeroarms, Kontur-2 and SpaceFactory 4.0 projects.
Two of the total of six finalists of the Georges Giralt PhD Award conducted research for their doctorates at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. In addition to Ribin Balachandran, former employee Nico Mansfeld also gave an excellent presentation. In the end, Ribin Balachandran emerged as one of the two winners.
The Georges Giralt PhD Award is a European dissertation prize awarded for outstanding achievements in the field of robotics. It is awarded annually to one or two PhD students at the European Robotics Forum by the Brussels-based non-profit organization euRobotics AISBL. The award winner's dissertation is published in the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics book series.
The awarding institution euRobotics AISBL, with around 280 member organizations, represents both the academic and industrial sectors of European robotics. In addition, euRobotics AISBL acts as the official interface between the European Commission and the academic and industrial robotics community in Europe. Eligible for the Georges Giralt PhD Award are all PhD students whose dissertation in the field of robotics has been successfully defended at a European university in the year of the call.
This is the ninth time that researchers from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics have received this international award. RM awardees of the past years were:
- 2021: Bernd Henze (with TU Munich)
- 2020: Cosimo Della Santina (postdoc at TUM, chair of Prof. Albu-Schäffer and visiting scientist at DLR).
- 2019: Teodor Tomić (with Univ. Hannover)
- 2018: Daniel Leidner (with the Univ. Bremen)
- 2017: Johannes Englsberger (with the TU Munich)
- 2016: Alexander Dietrich (with TU Munich)
Among other things, the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award 2023 was presented during the ERF. The spin-off Leverage Robotics of employee Roman Weitschat (with Jan Cremer and Dimitri Butsch) took an excellent second place among six finalists. The award honors outstanding examples of technology transfer in robotics and automation that have emerged from collaboration between research and industry.
