Nico Blodow
Fellow at Open Perception
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNico Blodow is a fellow and software architect in Munich with 16 years of experience building production-grade computer vision, AI, and robotics systems for mobile and distributed environments. He blends deep academic rigor—a summa cum laude PhD from TUM and a history of robotics research at CMU, Willow Garage and TUM—with hands-on product leadership as Chief Software Architect and Fellow at Fyusion. Nico co-founded and made lasting open-source contributions to the Point Cloud Library, notably enhancing Kinect/Primesense grabbers to bridge depth sensors with real-world applications. His career spans industrial projects at BMW and robotics toolchains like Franka Desk, demonstrating an ability to move algorithms from GPU-accelerated prototypes to deployable systems. Equally comfortable consulting on complex distributed robotics stacks or architecting 2D/3D perception pipelines, he’s known for turning challenging sensor and perception problems into reliable software products.
16 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Dr. rer. nat., Computer Science, summa cum laude, Dr. rer. nat., Computer Science, summa cum laude at Technical University MunichDiplom, Informatik, Diplom, Informatik at Technische Universität München / Technical University of MunichCarnegie Mellon University
German, English, French
Github Skills (7)
pcl10
computer-vision10
point-cloud-library10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
point-cloud10
kinect10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
PointCloudLibrary/pcl
Mar 2011 - Nov 2011
Point Cloud Library (PCL)
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:50 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Nico contributed significantly to the development of the Kinect grabber within the Point Cloud Library (PCL), adding interfaces and implementations for various Kinect and Primesense devices. Their work included creating grabber interfaces, implementing device-specific functionalities, and integrating color and depth image streams. The commits indicate a focus on enhancing the library's ability to interface with and utilize data from depth-sensing cameras.
cpppoint-cloud-libraryc-plus-pluscomputer-visionpcl-library
blodow/realtime_urdf_filter
Apr 2012 - Dec 2022
ROS package that can filter geometry defined in URDF models from Kinect depth images. Can also preprocess data for the OpenNI tracker, to remove backgrounds, robots etc.
Contributions:3 reviews, 41 commits, 11 PRs in 10 years 9 months
trackerurdf-modelspreprocessrobotsbackgrounds
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