My name is Stefan Fabian and I enjoy solving complex problems with simple, robust solutions. My journey started in middle school with a fascination for programming and app development. At university, I came into contact with rescue robotics and discovered my passion for integrated cyber-physical systems. What I found particularly interesting was building robust systems that have to work outside the lab, in unknown and unstructured environments.
During my time at the Technical University of Darmstadt, first as a student and later as a full-time doctoral researcher, I became an expert in C++ and ROS. I architected and implemented software systems for ground robots. I also developed multiple open-source libraries and reusable software components for robotics applications, including novel mapping and navigation algorithms, ROS message introspection, operator interfaces, and video transmission. Later, I ventured into hardware design and prototyping, where I conceived, designed, and managed the construction of wheeled and tracked ground robot demonstrators and research platforms.
The highlight for me was the development of Athena, an open-hardware tracked rescue robot, where I led the mechanical, electrical, and software design. The challenge was to build a lightweight robot with comprehensive sensor coverage, great mobility, and strong manipulation enabling cutting-edge rescue robotics research. We had to achieve this on a limited budget and with a small team of students who, albeit highly motivated and competent, also had other responsibilities. I learned a lot about project management, as well as hands-on hardware design and prototyping, and had to find creative solutions in manufacturing. For example, the robot's locomotion system is based on standard conveyor belts with custom-machined inserts to screw in the profiles from the top, making them easy to replace and cheap to repair. Despite these constraints, we built a first prototype in six months and refined it into a highly capable and robust robot in one and a half years.
I am currently looking for new challenges and job opportunities. If you need someone creative, with strong experience in robotics and software development, as well as hardware design and prototyping, I would love to hear from you: write me an e-mail () or message me on LinkedIn.
Modern, QML-based robotics debugging, introspection and control toolbox for ROS 2 with a plugin system for custom tools and a customizable docking interface.
ROS 2 live video streaming hub enabling simultaneous, efficient, low-latency and robust streaming to ROS and operator stations (SRT, WebRTC, RTP) using auto-optimized GStreamer pipelines created from simple YAML configuration.
The QML ROS Plugin brings full ROS and ROS 2 support to QML-based human machine and 2.5D human robot interfaces.
Allows introspection into ROS and ROS 2 messages and to communicate from C++ using message, service and action types that are unknown at compile time.
GStreamer source and sink elements bridging ROS 2 image topics and GStreamer pipelines for high-performance streaming of raw and compressed images while preserving ROS timestamps.
Reverse-engineered open C++ driver and GStreamer source for SeekThermal Compact, Compact Pro (FF) and Nano thermal cameras, including flat-field correction and per-unit calibration tools.
This small webtool plots the latency for all pipeline elements and the total latency per frame for your gstreamer pipeline.
Passed my doctoral examination (Dr.-Ing.) at the Technical University of Darmstadt with the grade very good (magna cum laude) for my dissertation
“Geometric-Stability-Aware Navigation and Bandwidth-Efficient Supervision of Heterogeneous Rescue Ground Robots in Unstructured 3D Environments”,
supervised by Prof. Dr. Oskar von Stryk and co-reviewed by Prof. Dr. Satoshi Tadokoro (Tohoku University, Japan).
The degree will be conferred upon publication of the dissertation.
Contribution highlights:
Led the development of Athena, an autonomous open-hardware tracked rescue robot platform, from mechanical and electrical design to the full autonomy software stack. [Paper]
Led the development of emergenCITY Swift, a fast wheeled robot demonstrator for autonomous exploration in urban environments, built in less than a year. Selected the components and led the hardware design and software integration.
Presented Hector UI, a flexible human-robot user interface for (semi-)autonomous rescue and inspection robots, at the IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics. [Paper]
Released my tools for efficient human-robot interface development at the European Conference on Mobile Robots with the title “Open-Source Tools for Efficient ROS and ROS2-based 2D Human-Robot Interface Development”. [Paper] [Preprint]
Started working as a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the emergenCITY research project.
Awarded my Master of Science degree at the Technical University of Darmstadt for my thesis on the topic “Online 3D Path Planning and Exploration for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Unstructured Environments”.
Participated as a member of Team Hector in the Plant Disaster Challenge at the World Robot Summit in Tokyo where we scored first place. My responsibilities included the user interface and the detection of rust in images.
The ARGOS challenge was a challenge hosted by TOTAL to create the first autonomous inspection robot for oil and gas platforms. I was part of the winning team Argonauts where I was responsible for the UI framework and the mission planning interface.
