Markus Hehn is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Verity, the global leader in autonomous indoor drone system. He leads the development of Verity’s technology, including the development of drones, indoor positioning systems, control software, and insight generation pipelines that make sense of data collected by the drones.

Markus completed his doctoral studies with Professor Raffaello D’Andrea at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zürich (Switzerland). His doctoral research was in the field of algorithms for the control of aerial vehicles, with a specific focus on exploiting the exceptional agility of the quadrotor vehicles that were used in the Flying Machine Arena. His research was concerned with understanding the physical limits of how quickly these vehicles can move, real-time trajectory generation algorithms that get close to these physical limits, and complex tasks that rely on the vehicle’s agility (such as balancing an inverted pendulum on a quadrocopter). He also contributed to the Flight Assembled Architecture project, for which he developed task-specific trajectory generation algorithms, worked on the robustness of the estimation algorithms to measurement data blackouts, and assisted with the implementation of a space reservation system.

Markus studied mechatronics at TU Darmstadt (Germany) and ETH Zürich (Switzerland) from 2003 to 2009, receiving a scholarship from Robert Bosch GmbH for his graduate studies. He has worked on optimizing the operating strategy of Diesel engines to reduce emissions and fuel consumption with Professor Lino Guzzella (as outlined in this paper), on the characterization of component load profiles for axle-split hybrid vehicle drive trains at Robert Bosch GmbH (a system that debuted in the Peugeot 3008 HYbrid4), and on the performance development of V8 Formula One racing engines at Mercedes-Benz HighPerformanceEngines (evolutions of these engines powered the 2008 and 2009 Formula One World Drivers’ Champions).