Rico Möckel (R.) - Maastricht University

Dr Rico Möckel (R.)

Rico Möckel is Associate Professor for Cognitive Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the Department of Data Science and Knowlegde Engineering (DKE).

He is Director of Research of DKE and the Director of the DKE SwarmLab - Laboratory for Cognitive Robotics and Complex Self-Organizing Systems at Maastricht University (http://swarmlab.unimaas.nl/).

Rico Möckel is a member of the Maastricht Young Academy (https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/research/maastricht-young-academy).

Until 2021 Rico Möckel formed and was the coordinator of the DKE Honours Programme – MaRBLe 2.0 – The Research Path.

Together with colleagues, Rico Möckel won the 2018 UM Data Science Research Competition, the 2017 UM IMPACT COURSE competition, a best poster award at the 2017 Real-Time Functional Imaging and Neurofeedback Conference (rtFIN), a best paper award at the 2017 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, a best paper award at the 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Presentation First Place and Gold Medal at the 2007 International Competition on Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM), the Industrial Robot Highly Recommended Award at the 2005 International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots, and the Best engineer student award from The Association of German Engineers (VDI Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) in 2002.

Expertise

Rico Möckel's research interest is focused on self-coordination and learning in complex and distributed autonomous systems.

His areas of expertise are in robotics and intelligent systems. Within these areas he is working in the fields of Cognitive Robotics, Neuro-Robotics, Assistive Robotics, Social Robotics for Elderly and Children, Swarm Robotics, Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Human-Robot Interaction as well as Locomotion Control and Learning.

Professional career history

Rico Möckel holds a Ph.D. from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and a Diploma (equivalent to MSc.) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rostock, Germany.

He was a postdoc and team leader at the EPFL Biorobotics Laboratory, Switzerland, as well as at the Locomotion Laboratory at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.