Nikolay Nikolov

Doctoral Student
Email: [email protected]

About me:

I am Niko, a PhD student in Computer Vision and Robotics, working with Prof. Luc Van Gool and Dr. Danda Pani Paudel.
My work is at the intersection of Robotics, World Modeling and Reinforcement Learning. I am particularly interested in developing end-to-end foundational models for Robotics.

Previously, I was part of the core research team at Wayve, an autonomous driving company. There, I developed one of the first offline Reinforcement Learning models applied to autonomous driving in the real world. With my team we proved that end-to-end AI can drive in complex urban environments such as central London, which at the time was considered impossible by the entire industry.

Education

ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Sep 2017 – Sep 2018

M.Eng. Exchange

Imperial College London, United Kingdom, Oct 2014 – Sep 2018

M.Eng. Electronic and Information Engineering (First Class Honors)

Professional Experience

Wayve, London, UK, Dec 2018 – Dec 2022

Applied Scientist

2026

Nikolay Nikolov, Giuliano Albanese, Sombit Dey, Aleksandar Yanev, Luc Van Gool, Jan-Nico Zaech, Danda Pani Paudel
SPEAR-1: Scaling Beyond Robot Demonstrations via 3D Understanding
In: The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)

2025

Sombit Dey, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel
ReVLA: Reverting Visual Domain Limitation of Robotic Foundation Models
In: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025)

Alexander Spiridonov, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel
Generalist Robot Manipulation beyond Action Labeled Data
In: The Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2025)