I am Associate Professor at the School of Engineering of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO), Seville, Spain, where I lead the Service Robotics Laboratory. I led the creation of the Systems Engineering and Automation division of UPO's School of Computer Science, where I have been Vice-Dean for five years.
I hold a Ph.D. degree on Robotics, from the University of Seville. This thesis was awarded with the ABB Award to the Best Doctoral Dissertation on Robotics 2007 in Spain, given by the Spanish Committee of Automation (CEA, Robotics Group).
My main research lines deal with cooperative robotic systems, including multi-robot systems and the cooperation between robots and persons. In these lines I have made contributions on new localization and navigation techniques, cooperative perception methods, decision making under uncertainties, and human-robot collaboration in social settings. I am leading or have led UPO’s team as PI in more than 15 international and national projects in these lines. Our group participated in the Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) in 2020, where we finished third in the Grand Finale of the competition.
I serve as Associated Editor of the Image and Vision Computing and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journals, and of ICRA and IROS, the two flagship conferences on robotics.