Maxim Vochten is a Senior Researcher in the Robotics & Autonomous Systems unit at the Royal Military Academy (RMA) in Brussels, Belgium. He leads the team of RMA within the European Defence Funds project GENIUS (2024-2027) on robotic demining.

He earned his MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering from KU Leuven in 2013 and his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from KU Leuven in 2018. After his PhD, he continued working in the Robotics Research Group at KU Leuven as a Postdoctoral Researcher within the ERC Advanced Grant project ROBOTGENSKILL (2018-2024) as part of a team of 8 researchers, supervised by Prof. Joris De Schutter. The project focused on improving the generalization of human-demonstrated robot skills using invariance and was proposed based on the results of his PhD work. Within the project, he contributed to paper publications, assisted with the project management, acted as co-promotor of two PhD researchers, and supervised over 10 master’s thesis students.

Outside of the ROBOTGENSKILL project, he led the team of KU Leuven (4 researchers) in the Flanders Make ICON project PROROB (2021-2022) on VR-based robot programming. Furthermore, he was responsible for the allocation of didactical tasks in the Automation division of the Mechanical Engineering department at KU Leuven.

Starting in 2025, he joined the Royal Military Academy in Brussels. His activities include the research and development of robotic technologies to improve the detection and dismantling of mines.

Maxim Vochten is interested in sensor perception, robot manipulation, motion planning, machine learning and learning from demonstration. His main expertise lies in 3D kinematics, state estimation, sensor-based robot control, numerical optimization, and optimal control.