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About

Lea Steffen is a robotics and computational neuroscience researcher whose work bridges bio-inspired computing, neuromorphic systems, and autonomous robot control. Her research spans three interconnected domains: neuromorphic vision and sensing, spiking neural network-based robot control, and 3D spatial perception and mapping. Steffen's most influential contribution is her 2019 survey on neuromorphic stereo vision (63 citations), which synthesized the rapidly evolving landscape of bio-inspired depth perception, establishing a foundational reference for the field. Complementing this, her work on microsaccades for neuromorphic stereo vision explored how biological eye movements can enhance event-driven sensing. She has consistently championed spiking neural networks as practical tools for robot arm control and motion planning, demonstrating their viability as alternatives to traditional inverse kinematics approaches across multiple publications. Her 2021 work on VDB-Mapping addressed real-world deployment challenges for mobile robots, delivering a memory-efficient volumetric mapping framework suited to dynamic environments. Steffen has also contributed to human-robot interaction through gesture-based control systems and investigated place cell-inspired neural architectures for 3D navigation. Her benchmarking of parallel neuromorphic hardware further underscores her commitment to making brain-inspired robotics computationally feasible. With over 170 cumulative citations, her portfolio reflects a coherent vision: bringing the efficiency and adaptability of biological neural systems into practical robotic applications.