NeMo.bil
Responsible for technical coordination and system development of the autonomous driving system. Second university to get L4 testing approval on public streets.
Research projectL4AV
~/research/samlei
Samuel Leitenmaier
PhD student · UTNResearch Associate · TH Augsburg
I work at the intersection of machine learning based planning and hardware acceleration for autonomous vehicles — with a particular interest in how heterogeneous SoCs can make real-time autonomy both efficient and reliable.
active research
pursuing PhD
Looking ahead
PhD candidate (currently)
Working toward a doctorate on planning-oriented autonomous driving beyond observed futures.
Research interests
- Autonomous driving — motion planning & scene understanding
- World models
- Heterogeneous computing & hardware/software co-design on FPGA and SoC platforms for real-time robotics
- Edge inference on resource-constrained embedded systems
News
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Sep 2026
Received the Best Poster Award at the ELLIS Summer School on Autonomous Driving.
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2026
Successfully completed the NeMo.bil project.
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Apr 2026
Joined UTN (University of Technology Nuremberg) as a PhD student in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab.
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2025
Poster presentation of the THAccelerated Motion Planner at the RoboARCH workshop, IEEE ICRA 2025. ↗ abstract
Publications
- Towards Specialized Hardware for Autonomous Driving Functions: THAccelerated Motion Planner ↗ abstract
- Autonomous Electric Race Car Inverter Development: Revving up the future with resource efficient drive technology ↗ ieee xplore
Projects
THAMP
FPGA-accelerated motion planner for autonomous vehicles, validated in hardware-in-the-loop and real-world testing.
FPGAmotion planningAV
YOLOv4 Edge
Object detection comparison between Jetson TX2 and UltraScale MPSoC — notable power efficiency advantage on FPGA.
edge AIFPGAbenchmarking
FS Inverter
Traction inverter for Formula Student EV — EnDat encoder interface, CAN-AXI bridge, custom embedded Linux stack.
embeddedLinuxCAN
Tools & languages
VHDL
HLS
C/C++
Python
Xilinx Vivado
ROS 2
Embedded Linux
Zynq UltraScale
CAN Bus
U-Boot