He was appointed full professor at Bielefeld University in 1993, where he was director of the Computer Engineering Group (chair) until 2001.[2] Between 2001 and 2004, he was a group leader and a member of the steering committee of the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems FhG-AIS.[3][4] There, he was also head of the research group for robots and robot kits for educational purposes. It was from this group that the “Roberta”[5] programme was launched in 2002, originally intended to encourage more girls to pursue robotics.[6] In this group, the forerunners of the “Robotino” robot were conceived, which was first built and launched in 2006 and has been continuously developed by Festo-Didactic ever since.[7]
In 2009, he co-founded fortiss, the State Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for Software-Intensive Systems, and was one of its three scientific directors until 2018.[9] From 2011 to 2021, he was Program Principal Investigator at TUMCREATE[10] in Singapore and head of the Area Interlinking Design Analysis group. Between 2017 and 2021, he was visiting professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.[10]
Between 2007 and 2009, he was a member of the EU's highest IT advisory body, the ISTAG Information Society Technologies Advisory Group,[11][12] and was involved in the design of the EU flagship projects[13] within the EU FET[14] – Future and Emerging Technologies programme. He is co-author of the inaugural FET Flagship Report.[15] From 2013 to 2023, he led the Neurorobotics sub-project of the FET Flagship Human Brain Project.
From 2019 to 2020, he was Chief Digital Officer of Siemens Mobility Intelligent Traffic Systems ITS, now Yunex GmbH.[16]
Research
His research area includes cognitive sensor-based robots, multi-sensor data fusion, autonomous systems, embedded systems development: each of these in the application areas of automotive, manufacturing, medicine and intelligent transport systems. In these fields, he has published over 1000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has served as an editor for international scientific journals and a conference organiser,[8] including Chief Editor of the journal Frontiers in Neurorobotics.[17]
He founded the IEEE’s “Humanoids” conference series and chaired the Humanoids2000 programme committee.[18] In 2015, he was Programme Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Robots and Intelligent Systems (IROS) in Hamburg, Germany.[19] He also helped found the IEEE Cyborgs and Bionic Systems (CBS) conference series[20] and delivered the first keynote of the series at CBS 2017,[21] was General Chair of CBS 2019[22] in Munich, Germany, and is a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee for Cyborg & Bionic Systems.[23]
Alois Knoll has supervised a large number of doctoral and postdoctoral students and guided them to their degrees. Several of his graduates and post-doctoral researchers have also become professors, either directly or via other positions, including Guang Chen,[24] Manuel Giuliani,[25] Florian Röhrbein[26] and Jianwei Zhang.[27] An essential part of his activities in the field of teaching was the establishment of the Master's programme “Robotics, Cognition and Intelligence”[28][29] in 2010. Starting in its first year with a single-digit number of students, it has become the second largest programme of the former Faculty of Computer Science at TUM.[30] Together with Klaus Kuhn,[31] he founded the “Graduate School for Information Science in Health“ in 2008[32] and led it until it was transferred to the “Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering”.[33]
Alois Knoll; Christian Buckl; Karl-Josef Kuhn; Gernot Spiegelberg (2019), "The RACE Project: an Informatics-Driven Greenfield Approach to Future E/E-Architectures for Cars", Automotive Systems and Software Engineering: 171–195
Zhenshan Bing; Claus Meschede; Florian Röhrbein; Kai Huang; Alois Knoll (2018), "A Survey of Robotics Control Based on Learning-Inspired Spiking Neural Networks", Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 12: 1–22
Guang Chen; Zhenshan Bing; Florian Röhrbein; Jörg Conradt; Kai Huang; Long Cheng; Zhuangyi Jiang; Alois Knoll (2019), "Toward Brain-inspired Learning with the Neuromorphic Snake-like Robot and the Neurorobotic Platform", IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems: 1–12
Markus Huber; Alois Knoll; Thomas Brandt; Stefan Glasauer (2009), "Handing Over a Cube: Spatial Features of Physical Joint-Action", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: 380–382
Giorgio Panin; Alois Knoll (2008), "Mutual Information-Based 3D Object Tracking", International Journal of Computer Vision, 78 (1): 107–118, doi:10.1007/s11263-007-0083-7, S2CID11975483
Alois Knoll; Torsten Scherer; Iris Poggendorf; Dirk Lütkemeyer; Jürgen Lehmann (2004), "Flexible Automation of Cell Culture and Tissue Engineering Tasks", Biotechnology Progress, 20 (6): 1825–1835, doi:10.1021/bp049759v, PMID15575718, S2CID11620985
Alois Knoll; B. Hildenbrandt; J. Zhang (1997), "Instructing cooperating assembly robots through situated dialogues in natural language", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation: 888–894
