Leonardo Fellowship of BBVA Foundation

 

I have been awarded a Leonardo Fellowship of the BBVA Foundation. These fellowships provide 40,000€ to develop research projects with a duration between 12 and 18 months. Only 59 fellowships have been awarded out of 1,580 applicants (5 out of 144 in the area of engineering and architecture). 

My project is entitled "Training robots for intervening in dangerous environments: development and application of reinforcement learning models". I will be writing here about how the project is developing. Meanwhile, you can find more information at the official website.

SwarmCity Project on TV!

The spanish public television has made a report about SwarmCity Project. The piece has appeared in the program Zoom Net of TVE 1, TVE Internacional and 24h. I am very proud to see the new result of our project. We have worked very hard to carry out this project, although we did not get the financial support from public and private organizations. In three years we have developed a city simulator, swarm intelligence and data fusion algorithms, and an adaptive and immersive interface. Additionally, we have published two articles in journals (Cognitive Systems Research and Personal and Ubiquitous Computing) and other two in conferences (IEEE IROS 2018 and IEEE PerCom 2019). Finally, some students have done their BSc and MSc theses in the context of SwarmCity Project. I hope this is not the end...

Extraordinary PhD Award of the Technical University of Madrid!

I have received the extraordinary PhD award from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). This distinction is granted by the UPM to the best PhD thesis presented in this university during the last academic year. One more year I have attended the Santo Tomás de Aquino celebration, but this time the dress code has been a little bit more flexible. I am very happy with this last award for my PhD thesis, but as I usually say: the best things in this period have been the knowledge I got and the people I met.

Our research in press

SwarmCity, the project that we created, directed and developed, has appeared in press:

¿Pueden los drones ayudarnos a mejorar nuestras ciudades? - UPM - Madri+d - ambientum

Enjambres de drones para mejorar la vida en la ciudad - Sinc - eldiario.es - nobbot

La UPM lidera un proyecto de "enjambre de drones" para supervisar ciudades - La Vanguardia

Una flota de drones inteligentes para garantizar la seguridad en las ciudades del futuro - Cuadernos de Seguridad

La UPM y el CSIC desarrollan un enjambre de drones para monitorizar ciudades - infodron.es

Un 'enjambre de drones' para supervisar el tráfico y la contaminación de la ciudad - La Razón

A year of changes

I started the year 2019 becoming unemployed. Then, I worked for the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), I taught "Design, Integration and Verification of Machines" at the Comillas Pontifical University, and I created my enterprise Aibot, at the same time. During this year I suffered the main problems of researchers in Spain: unemployment periods, rigged selection processes, project delays, lack of resources... However, I finished this year finding a great opportunity.

I have joined as Assistant Professor to the Department of Computer Science of the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). During two years, I will teach "Software Analysis and Design Project" in the BSc in Computer Engineering (Spanish and English), while I will continue researching in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. I am very grateful to the people of the UAM for trusting me despite they did not know me before.

RoboCity2030 Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Workshop

Today, I have been at the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Workshop organized by the RoboCity2030 Project. In this event, I have presented a poster about my work in the context of the SUREVEG Project. The poster is entitled "Training a mobile manipulator to follow crop lines with reinforcement learning" and is my first work in artificial intelligence applied to robotics. I have developed a control system for a manipulator robot based on neural networks trained with reinforcement learning. Here you can see the poster (Don't forget to watch the video!):

Award for the best PhD thesis in Robotics of Spain!

I have been honored with the award for the best PhD thesis in Robotics of Spain!

This prize have been organized by the Spanish Automation Committee (Comité Español de Automática, CEA) for the last decades and this time have been funded by the company Robotnik. Eleven researchers from different universities of Spain presented their PhD thesis to the contest. After a first round of revisions carried out by a group of experts, three of them were invited to present their thesis in the final round. We attended to the Spanish Automation Conference (Jornadas de Automática) that took place in Ferrol (Galicia), where we presented our thesis and another group of experts decided the winner.

I cannot find the words that describe how satisfied I feel. Since I finished my PhD the last summer, I have been through bad times and I have doubted about my future. I hope this award can be an incentive to continue fighting in this hard world.