Sebastian Scherer

Sebastian Scherer is an Associate Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and a leading figure in AirLab, where he develops foundational principles and systems for 'resilient robotics.' His work addresses one of the central challenges in autonomy: enabling robots to operate safely, reliably, and adaptively in highly uncertain and dynamically changing environments. Scherer’s research integrates robust perception, adaptive state estimation, resilient planning, and learning-based methods to bridge the gap between theoretical models and real-world field deployment. He investigates how autonomous systems can maintain performance when facing degraded sensing, extreme environmental variability, or mismatches between model assumptions and reality. His contributions span autonomous flight, off-road driving, subterranean exploration, disaster response, multi-agent coordination, and safety in shared airspace. Through rigorous field validation and iterative closed-loop testing, his group advances algorithms that continuously improve with data, pushing robotics toward reliable autonomy in mission-critical applications.