Marko Bjelonic (born 1990 in Banja Luka, Yugoslavia) is an enthusiastic roboticist and future entrepreneur. During his doctoral degree at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marco Hutter (ETH Zurich, Prof. Dr. Stelian Coros (ETH Zurich), and Prof. Dr. Sangbae Kim (MIT in Boston), Marko developed optimization-based methods focusing on motion control and planning for wheeled-legged robots over challenging terrain (2017 – 2021), which has more than a million views through prestigious news articles like Reuters, CNN, BBC News, IEEE Spectrum and more. Marko holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from TU Darmstadt, Germany (2010 – 2013, 2013 – 2016). He spent the first year of his Master’s degree at the Cybernetics department of NTNU in Trondheim, Norway (2013 – 2014). During his studies, he worked at the Mercedes-AMG GmbH in Affalterbach (Germany), Fraunhofer LBF in Darmstadt (Germany), and most notably at CSIRO in Brisbane (Australia) with Dr. Alberto Elfes and Dr. Navinda Kottege on multi-legged robots. Previous work during his Master’s thesis consists of the development of the hexapod robot, Weaver, including its state estimation, perception, autonomy, and control algorithms. In 2020, he managed his family owned business with an annual sales of 350K USD and negotiated a company sale in 2021.