Hi, I’m Markus!

I work at the intersection of control theory, distributed AI, and physical robotics. Currently, I am a Research Scientist in AI & Simulation at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) in Kjeller, researching agentic AI architectures integrated with physics-based simulators.

Before returning to applied research, I spent two decades as an R&D engineer and technical lead building autonomous systems for production-including industrial manipulators at ABB Robotics, autonomous drilling robots at Canrig Robotics (2 US patents), real-time ROS 2 interfaces at Yaskawa Robotics, offshore power systems at Rolls-Royce Marine, and deepwater control systems for Equinor and GE. As a postdoc at Heriot-Watt University's Ocean Systems Lab, I led the research and software architecture for the UNITE project, taking a multi-agent system from simulation to field deployment with Fugro.

My research builds autonomous multi-robot systems that reason and plan directly from high-level mission intent. By grounding distributed decision-making in neural world models (UROSA) alongside nonlinear system identification (SINDy), whole-body MPC, and ergodic exploration, I enable robust multi-agent coordination under degraded communications-thoroughly verified using digital twins (AURA) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing.

Outside the lab, I’m usually on a bike or cross-country skis-clearing my head and putting in the kilometers.

Explore my Code, Project Portfolio, and Research & Publications.