Teaching

TUM offers general information about the examinations. The new TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology (former EI faculty) prepared a list of relevant information and documents for examination.

Teaching Philosophy

I consider teaching to be the process of instilling fundamental concepts and paradigms for life-long learning. Once students leave the formal educational system they need to have
the right skill set to handle a variety of challenges awaiting them during their careers, from the initial innovative idea or challenging real-world problem to the final solution.
To achieve this goal, the first obligation of an academic instructor is to create a safe, interactive and collaborative environment that encourages students to be active members in the learning process. Equally important is to display one’s own sincere interest and passion toward the taught materials, stimulating students to not only display engagement but also avid enthusiasm for what they are learning. In fact, becoming such an inspirational teacher that supports and guides students to develop towards highly trained, curious and responsible engineers, scientists and thinkers has been the main reason that I chose to be an academic. My enthusiasm and passion for my profession also helped me to motivate my students to strive for excellence and develop the right sense of questioning the existing. 

The two core pillars to my approach to train students are: 

1. foundational multi-disciplinary skills and 
2. the ability to find solutions to complex engineering problems. 

Ultimately, I want to empower students to be able to systematically find the way from an initial innovative idea or challenging real-world problem to the final solution. Robotics and machine intelligence at large bridge diverse fields such as design, control, machine learning, sensing and artificial intelligence. While I believe, it is crucial to have a very strong background in one of these domains, the basic understanding and embracing of the full dimension and richness of our discipline is equally essential to achieve true innovation and unveil the unforeseen. 

My courses thus build strong bridges between theoretical rigor and highly skilled implementation in complex robotic systems, ranging from mechatronics design and controller synthesis to learning algorithms and system integration. On a general note, robotics has transformed from being a specialized subfield of CS, EE and ME to an interdisciplinary field that soon will be considered an independent scientific discipline. Therefore, I believe that every engineering school should establishdedicated Robotics Master’s and PhD programs; in the long run also at the undergraduate level.