Markus Giftthaler
ETH Zurich, Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, Robert Bosch (Germany)
Papers
14
Total Citations
584
H-Index
9
About
Markus Giftthaler is a leading researcher at the intersection of robotics, architecture, and advanced control systems, whose work is fundamentally reshaping how we think about construction and automation. His primary contributions lie in mobile robotic fabrication for in situ construction, where he has pioneered methods for robots to operate autonomously on unstructured building sites rather than in controlled factory settings. His seminal paper "Digital in situ fabrication" (146 citations) established the foundational challenges and opportunities for this emerging field, while "Mobile Robotic Brickwork" (108 citations) demonstrated practical implementation. Giftthaler's impact extends to the DFAB HOUSE project, where his Mesh Mould wall fabrication technique (75 citations) showcased real-world application of mobile robotic construction. Beyond architecture, he made significant contributions to the robotics community through the Control Toolbox (64 citations), an open-source C++ library for optimal and model predictive control that has become a valuable resource for researchers worldwide. His work on automatic differentiation of rigid body dynamics (54 citations) and constrained optimal control (24 citations) has advanced the theoretical foundations of robot control, enabling more efficient algorithms for trajectory optimization and estimation.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Mobile Robotic Brickwork108 citations · 2016
- 3
- 4
- 5Autonomous repositioning and localization of an in situ fabricator61 citations · 2016
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9Sample-Efficient Learning for Industrial Assembly using Qgraph-bounded DDPG12 citations · 2020
- 10Optimal and Learning Control for Autonomous Robots8 citations · 2017