According to the ranking of Academic Influence, emergenCITY Program Area Lead Prof. Dr. Oskar von Styk is one of the 25 most influential computer scientists worldwide. He is the only professor from a German university to occupy the 21st rank among predominantly American professors. The ranking by Academic Influence is based on the calculation of a numerical influence score from multiple data sources reflecting academic achievement and merit.

Prof. von Stryk is an expert in the field of robotics and heads the Simulation, System Optimisation and Robotics Group at TU Darmstadt. He was also involved in founding the German Rescue Robotics Center (DRZ) and is a member of the board there. He is a vice president of the RoboCup Federation as well as founding trustee of the Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence. At TU Darmstadt he established the interdepartmental Bachelor and Master programs for Computational Engineering as founding dean of studies and was also key in establishing the Autonomous Systems master program. Furthermore Prof. von Stryk has co-founded three startups and has been awarded the first price of the European robotics technology transfer program.

Prof. von Stryk’s robotics teams can also boast numerous successes. His Team Argonauts won the ARGOS Challenge. With Team Hector and Team ViGIR he participated in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Both teams have published large amounts of open source software. Team Hector has also won numerous awards. For example, Team Hector became the World Champion of the RoboCup Rescue Robot League in 2014, won the Best in Class Autonomy Award of the RoboCup Rescue Robot League in 2012-2015 and 2018-2019, took first place in the Plant Disaster Prevention Challenge at the World Robot Summit 2018 in Tokyo. His teams have also won five championships in autonomous soccer playing robots at RoboCup.

At emergenCITY, Prof. von Stryk leads the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Program Area, which researches (semi-)autonomous robotic platforms and systems for emergency and rescue operations in complex environments.