Rate My Professor Jan Steckel

Jan Steckel is an associate research professor in the Department of Electronics and Information and Communication Technologies within the Faculty of Applied Engineering at the University of Antwerp. He conducts research at the CoSys-Lab, specializing in the co-design and co-development of cyber-physical systems throughout their lifecycle, from low-level hardware to high-level intelligence. His expertise encompasses physical setups involving acoustic and pulse-echo array sensors, embedded and control systems, electro-mechanics, robotics, and energy harvesting, with goals of enhancing safety, reliability, resilience, energy efficiency, low latency, high throughput, and safe human-machine interaction. Applications of his work include biological and medical technologies, human-centered systems, and advanced machinery for industry, transport, and agriculture. Steckel employs advanced methods such as global optimization, design patterns, heterogeneous sensor fusion, semantic frameworks for long-wavelength sensing, and learning techniques for repetitive tasks. Key research domains include 3D sonar, acoustic signal processing, embedded systems, electronics, signal processing, artificial intelligence, robotics, sensor arrays, and echolocation.

Steckel obtained his degree in electronic engineering from University College Karel de Grote in Hoboken in 2007 and his doctoral degree from the University of Antwerp's Active Perception Lab in 2012, with a dissertation titled 'Array processing for in-air sonar systems - drawing inspirations from biology.' He teaches courses including Systems Theory, Applied Digital Image and Data Processing, and Cyber-Physical Systems across Bachelor and Master programs in Electronics and ICT Engineering Technology, as well as related bridging and teaching programs. His research has led to involvement in numerous projects, such as Autonomous Quadrotor Flight through Biologically Inspired Echolocation (2026-2029), Flanders Make Infrastructure Research Agreements on intralogistics (2025-2035), SITANAV for situational aware navigation and mapping (2024-2028), CAVE for testing perception systems in harsh environments (2024-2027), PIONEERS for green port innovations (2021-2026), and Nexor for cyber-physical systems in Industry 4.0 (2021-2026). Publications include 'Place recognition using batlike sonar' (eLife, 2016) and 'Bio-acoustic tracking and localization using heterogeneous microphone arrays' (Communications Biology, 2021), contributing to over 1,956 citations on Google Scholar.