Welcome!👋 I'm a Research Scientist, Beatriz Galindo Distinguished Junior Professor, and Co-Lead of the Space Robotics Lab at the University of Malaga. Through my research I explore innovative mobility systems and unique navigation methods for the robotic exploration of other celestial bodies. I spend most days working on fast lunar robots and cool new sensing technologies, with the goal of ultimately enabling robotic autonomy to explore some of the most extreme environments in the inner Solar System. I'm also the proud father of a tiny thermonuclear runaway named Nova.

• Full CV
• CVA (AEI format)
• Long Biography

My Research

Selected Publications

High-speed mobility in planetary surfaces: a technical review

D. Rodríguez-Martínez, M. Van Winnendael, K. Yoshida

Journal of Field Robotics, 36(8), 1436-1455, 2019

Enabling Faster Locomotion of Planetary Rovers with a Mechanically-Hybrid Suspension

D. Rodríguez-Martínez*, K. Uno*, K. Sawa, M. Uda, G. Kudo, G. Hernan Diaz, A. Umemura, S. Santra, K.Yoshida

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 9(1), 619-626, Jan 2024. *indicates equal contribution and shared authorship. [Video]

The effects of increasing velocity on the tractive performance of planetary rovers

D. Rodríguez-Martínez, F. Buse, M. Van Winnendael, K. Yoshida

15th ISTVS Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, 2019. (best paper of the conference award) [Video]

SPICE-HL3: Single-Photon, Inertial, and Stereo Camera dataset for Exploration of High-Latitude Lunar Landscapes

D. Rodríguez-Martínez, Dave van der Meer, Junlin Song, Abishek Bera, C. J. Pérez-del-Pulgar, and Miguel Angel Olivares-Mendez

Scientific Data, 13, 374, 2026 [Video]

Fast Vision in the Dark: A Case for Single-Photon Imaging in Planetary Navigation

D. Rodríguez-Martínez, C.J. Pérez del Pulgar

18th Symposium on Advanced Space Technologies in Robotics and Automation (ASTRA), 2025, Leiden, The Netherlands.

A lunar reconnaissance drone for cooperative exploration and high-resolution mapping of extreme locations

R. Tonasso, D. Tataru, H. Rauch, V. Pozsgay, T. Pfeiffer, E. Uythoven, D. Rodríguez-Martínez

Acta Astronautica, 218, 1-17, May 2024

• Full Publication List

Code & Datasets

These are some major software and datasets I've worked on and released publicly.

CAVERS: Multimodal SLAM Data from a Natural Karstic Cave with Ground Truth Motion Capture

• ARXIV
• DATASET
• SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

SPICE-HL3: Single-Photon, Inertial, and Stereo Camera dataset for Exploration of High-Latitude Lunar Landscapes

• ARXIV
• DATASET
• SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Explorer 1 (EX1) rover source code and design files

• MASTER & USER MANUAL

Every now and then I enjoy taking on small pet projects, experiments, and half-baked ideas that I tinker with just for fun, all of which can be found on my GitHub. Here are some of them:

• ORBSLAM3 dockerized implementation: I got ORBSLAM3 up and running and used the process as a crash course in Docker. I included plenty of notes on how the whole thing unfolded.
• SPAD camera simulator: tiny project built for fun over a long weekend. I may continue working on it and expand it with new capabilities.
• Space Robotics Index: started it initialy as a personal project to keep track of space robotics papers presented at major conferences now turned into a public ongoing curated list of papers from these conferences.
• Lunar terrain for CoppeliaSim: a virtual lunar surface I built back in the day.

Workshops, Tutorials, and Demos

These are the workshops, tutorials, and demos I helped organize and run.

Contact

Address University of Málaga, Escuela de Ingenierías Industriales, Office 2.119.D, 29071 Málaga, Spain
Email david (dot) rm (at) uma (dot) es
Office hours Office hours: Thursdays, 11:00-13:00 / 14:00-16:00

For UMA students

• If you are undegraduate or graduate student at UMA interested in conducting your TFG or TFM in our lab, check the list of available projects here.

Exchange students from abroad

• If you are an international student interested in doing an internship, research stay, or your senior/master thesis in our lab, note that we can only offer scholarships to students who are currently enrolled at the University of Malaga.
• Most international students who intern with us often do so through different scholarship schemes, such as the Erasmus+ Program. You may want to check with your home university's international office for more information.

PhD and Postdoc applications

• Check all our open positions here.
• If you are a PhD or Postdoc interested in doing a research stay in our lab, send me an email using "Research Stay" as the email subject, including the following information: 1) your CV, 2) preferred duration for your stay and desired starting date, 3) whether you have secured funding to support your stay with us or need financial support, and a 4) brief description of your current research and how an stay with us could support/complement/enhance it.

Scholarship applications

• In the event that no open positions are available in our lab, I often assist national and international students interested in conducting an internship, master's, or PhD in our group with their applications to a number of scholarship programs.
• Note that our lab does not offer any scholarships.
• If interested, send me an email using "Scholarship Application" as the email subject, including the following information: 1) your CV, 2) targeted scholarship program with due dates for submission of your application and earliest starting date if successful, 3) a short description (250-500 words) of the project you would like to conduct, and 4) comments on your experience/prior work related to the project.

Blog

• [June 2026] Reflections from ICRA'26
• [August 2024] My experience as a postdoc at EPFL (Switzerland)
• [May 2024] The lost utility of academic conferences
• [May 2024] Not your lab, not your monkeys
• [July 2020] Do the opposite
• [July 2018] The pace of the elder
• [July 2017] Life after college: how to find your own compass (when everyone tells you not to)