Rob Janssen

Eindhoven University of Technology, Systems Technology (United States)

Papers

Total Citations

457

H-Index

About

Rob Janssen is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of multi-robot systems, cloud robotics, and autonomous task planning. He is best known for his foundational contributions to the **RoboEarth** project, a landmark initiative that pioneered the concept of a globally accessible knowledge-sharing network for robots — analogous to the internet for humans. His 2011 paper on RoboEarth, which has accumulated over 420 citations, introduced frameworks for encoding, exchanging, and reusing robotic knowledge across heterogeneous platforms, fundamentally advancing how robots learn from one another's experiences. Janssen's subsequent work deepened this vision by addressing practical challenges in deployment. He explored cloud-based centralized task control for multi-robot operations in human environments, and developed deliberation layers using Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning to bridge abstract task descriptions and concrete robot execution plans. His integration of planning and execution within ROS-enabled service robots demonstrated that diverse robotic hardware could share high-level symbolic instructions seamlessly. Collectively, his research has helped lay the groundwork for scalable, collaborative robotic systems capable of operating intelligently in everyday human environments, making him a notable contributor to the field of service and assistive robotics.