He defended his PhD in Germany on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, he moved to Denmark

He found out quickly. In Germany, registering as a resident means paperwork and repeated visits to public offices. In Denmark it took one short meeting, but most of it could be arranged digitally in advance: “I’m a fully functioning member of society, like basically immediately.”

Weikert games in his spare time. At work, he put that interest into use, building a drone simulator in a game engine

Dominik is a postdoc at Aalborg University and part of PERSIST, a research project developing autonomous drone operations at critical energy infrastructure, with University of Southern Denmark, Aalborg University, the drone and AI company Robotto, and energy providers HOFOR and Ørsted.

At power plants, much of the inspection work is still manual and time-consuming. PERSIST is building a system that can run inspection missions on a regular, automated schedule alongside the operators already carrying out the checks.

Flying real drones is heavily regulated, which is why one of Weikert’s first contributions was to build a simulation environment in Unreal Engine (a game creation platform) – which he is now using to generate the training data for the project’s computer vision work.

Drones you can talk to

Dominiks mission in the project is to create a system that allows people who are not experts in AI or robotics to work with AI-controlled drones in a straightforward way. In practice, that means talking to the drone. Say “go inspect that building”, and the system works out which building you mean, makes a plan, and flies there.

That is not the same as letting the AI decide: “It’s not just tossing our drones into a fully AI-controlled system. There are security checks along the way, and predefined missions – but the way you interact with the system is through natural language.”

While Danish is hard to learn, Dominik’s plan is clear: stay in Denmark, and stay in a field that is advancing quickly.

“If you’re already in an AI and robotics-focused field, it would be a mistake to move out of that right now.”