Steven L. Waslander

Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineeering
Director, Waterloo Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue
Waterloo, ON, Canada
N2L 3G1

Office: E3X-4118
Email: stevenw@uwaterloo.ca
Phone: (519) 888-4567 x32205

Biography

Prof. Steven Waslander, Associate Professor, Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo, is a leading authority on autonomous aerial and ground vehicles, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and multi-vehicle systems.  He received his B.Sc.E.in 1998 from Queen’s University, his M.S. in 2002 and his Ph.D. in 2007, both from Stanford University in Aeronautics and Astronautics, where as a graduate student he created the Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC), the world’s most capable outdoor multi-vehicle quadrotor platform at the time. He was a Control Systems Analyst for Pratt & Whitney Canada from 1998 to 2001. He was recruited to Waterloo from Stanford in 2008, where he founded and directs the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory (WAVELab), extending the state of the art in autonomous drones and autonomous driving through advances in localization and mapping, object detection and tracking, integrated planning and control methods and multi-robot coordination.

Prof. Waslander’s innovations were recognized by the Ontario Centres of Excellence Mind to Market award for the best Industry/Academia collaboration (2012, with Aeryon Labs), and through two Outstanding Performance Awards, and two Distinguished Performance Awards.  His work on AV has led to new collaborations with partners in this proposal, Renesas and QNX, as well as others including Huawei and Denso, each seeking to develop and test self-driving cars on Canada’s roads in 2017. His insights into autonomous driving have been featured in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post, the Rick Mercer Report, and on national CBC Radio.  He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, has served as the General Chair for the International Autonomous Robot Racing Competition (IARRC 2012-15), as the program chair for the 13th and 14th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2016-17), as the Competitions Chair for the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017).

Personal

My talented wife is starting an amazing business for home renovation management.  Check it out if you’re looking for a general contractor in your area!