Niels Van Duijkeren
Staff Engineer at FERNRIDE
Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNiels Van Duijkeren is a Staff Engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in numerical optimization and AI-driven real-time motion planning for robots ranging from differential-drive platforms to 7-DOF arms. He bridges rigorous academic research in nonlinear model predictive control (PhD from KU Leuven) with production-grade software, contributing core performance and sensitivity methods to prominent open-source toolkits like acados and hpipm. His work focuses on synthesizing feedback schemes that combine NMPC, interaction models (including human behavior), and discrete decision-making to enable safe multi-agent coordination in constrained, dynamic environments. Practically-minded, he designs idiomatic, high-performance navigation software that leverages algorithmic differentiation, efficient linear algebra, and structure-exploiting convex solvers. A recurring theme in his contributions is making advanced optimization methods accessible for embedded and real-time use, evidenced by his back-end development on acados and ACADO code-generation interfaces. Based in Stuttgart, he now applies this expertise to autonomy at scale in the autonomous trucking domain.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics / Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics / Mechanical Engineering at KU LeuvenBSc. Minor, Mechanical Engineering, BSc. Minor, Mechanical Engineering at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule ZürichTU Delft
Dutch, English, German, Chinese
Github Skills (17)
c-language10
c1110
controlling10
c1710
control-theory10
controls10
code-generation10
controlled10
control-flow10
high-performance10
cprogramming-language10
linear-algebra10
optimization10
algorithm9
algorithms9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
acados/acados
Sep 2017 - May 2018
Fast and embedded solvers for nonlinear optimal control
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 83 commits, 13 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Niels primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the acados library, focusing on version compatibility with external libraries such as Casadi and implementing performance improvements. Their work involved refactoring core data structures, implementing sensitivity methods, and preparing the QP solver. They also made changes to various build configurations and examples.
nonlinearnonlinear-optimizationsolversoptimizationsolver
giaf/hpipm
May 2020 - Sep 2020
High-performance interior-point-method QP and QCQP solvers
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 4 PRs, 5 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Niels's contributions primarily involve syncing the repository with an upstream source, indicating maintenance or integration work. Code changes include modifications within test problems related to a dynamic optimal control problem (OCP) and its associated solvers, indicating a focus on problem setup and testing. The changes also touch upon internal function calls and data structures within the hpipm library, and they've implemented getter functions to retrieve the data.
solversmethodoptimizationmultiobjective-optimizationconstrained-optimization
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