Long Biography

I'm a Beatriz Galindo Distinguished Junior Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation at the University of Málaga, and co-lead of the Space Robotics Lab together with Prof. Carlos Pérez del Pulgar. I joined UMA in December 2024 with a research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, after nearly a decade of research abroad.

My works sits at the intersection of how planetary robots move and how they see. I'm interested in three questions: what's required to make rovers travel faster than ever before?, how can they perceive their surroundings when almost no light is available?, and how can we make them reach those places conventional rovers haven't yet been able to explore?

How I got here

I was born and raised in Madrid. My research career started in 2014 with a master's thesis under Prof. Ever Barbero from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University (WVU), co-directed by Prof. Carlos Navarro Ugena from the Continuum Mechanics and Structural Analysis group at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M). Since then, I've worked on international projects and led research teams in seven countries across three continents. I hold BSc and MSc degrees in Mechanical Engineering from UC3M (2008-15), master's degree in Space Studies from the International Space University (ISU) (2015-16), and a PhD in Robotics and Aerospace Engineering from Tohoku University (2017-20).

Can rovers travel 100x faster?

Around 2018, early in my Phd, I kicked off a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Tohoku University: the “High-speed lunar locomotion” project. With support from Michel Van Winnendael at ESA and Prof. Kazuya Yoshida at the Space Robotics Lab (SRL), we challenged a long-standing assumption in planetary exploration: that rovers must move slowly. We started to look at ways to enable lunar rovers to travel at speeds two orders of magnitude faster than those of current missions. By the end of my PhD, we had built a team at the SRL—with one additional PhD student, four master's students, and one exchange student—, written the first comprehensive review dedicated to high-speed planetary mobility, built and tested a prototype of a new rover (Explorer 1) designed with a novel suspension mechanism designed to mitigate the perturbations of high-speed travel on unstructured terrains (later featured by NHK News), and—with the support of the German Aerospace Center—we conducted the most extensive testing campaign to date on the effects of speed on the interaction between rover wheels and planetary soil simulants. That group at Tohoku continues to spearhead research efforts on the effects of speed on off-road robotic mobility, and ESA has since initiated new industry- and academic-led activities on the subject of faster navigation in planetary environments.

Small detour from academia

After finishing my PhD, I spent two and half years at the EPFL Space Center (eSpace), where I founded and directed EPFL's Lunar Hub, a home base for Swiss lunar research and technology development. During this period, I contributed as project manager for EPFL in multiple university-industry projects including the capture system concept validation and relative navigation technologies for failed satellite removal alongside the company ClearSpace and New European Space Transportation Solutions (NESTS), led by Ariane Group and formed by a large consortium of private entities such as Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, Telespazio, Orbex, and D-Orbit. By the end of 2022, I realized how much I missed research and decided to return full time to academia (something you can read more about here).

How can rovers see under suboptimal illumination?

Between April 2023 and October 2024, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Prof. Edoardo Charbon's Advanced Quantum Architecture (AQUA) Laboratory at EPFL. With the support of armasuisse Science & Technology (S+T)—the center of technology at the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (DDPS)—, we started multiple projects on the use of single-photon imaging technology for autonomous navigation of robots operating in environments where conventional cameras fail: extreme darkness/brightness, rapid illumination changes, and high dynamic range. I've brought this line of research with me to UMA, where we have since produced SPICE-HL3, the first publicly available single-photon, inertial, and stereo dataset for the exploration of the lunar poles, published in Scientific Data.

How can rovers reach places conventional rovers can't?

While at the EPFL Space Center, I launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Drone (LRD) project to explore the feasibility of designing and deploying a compact, fully autonomous drone for high-resolution mapping of hardly accessible lunar regions. We presented the work in major international forums and a paper describing the outcome of this project was published in Acta Astronautica. More recently, in collaboration with researchers at Polytechnic University of Turin (PoliTo) Centre on Service Robotics, we have released CAVERS, a multimodal SLAM dataset recorded in Cueva de la Victoria, a natural karstic cave located in Málaga, Spain.

Community

In 2022 I founded HERMES, an international working group formed by renowned field scientists, researchers, and industry experts on the subject of heterogeneous multi-robot cooperation for exploration and science in extreme environments. Its first workshop at ICRA 2023 in London drew around 150 attendees and more than 20 speakers, followed by a second edition at ICRA 2024 in Yokohama. I co-chaired the original edition of the International Conference on Space Robotics (iSpaRo) and I've been a Program Committee member of the last two editions. I organized the I Doctoral Workshop on Space Robotics in Málaga in 2025, the ERF2024 Space Robotics Workshop, and two other workshops at ICRA 2026. I currently serve on euRobotics topic groups on Space Robotics, Autonomous Navigation, and Perception, and on IEEE RAS technical committees on Computer & Robot Vision, Space Robotics, Multi-Robot Systems, and Robot Learning. I'm a guest editor for the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems.

Teaching and mentoring

Over the years, I have personally supervised (directed or co-directed) more than 25 graduate student projects—9 master's theses and 32 senior theses/semester/exchange student projects to date (full list here)—and coordinated student initiatives involving more than 200 students. I'm currently supervising one doctoral student, while I indirectly supported the work of 5 PhDs (3 in Tohoku and 2 at EPFL). At EPFL, I taught and directed master's level courses on Concurrent Engineering of Space Missions (ENG411) and Spacecraft Design and Systems Engineering (EE584), with around 60 students enrolled every year. Now at UMA, I direct and teach the Vehicle Control Systems course part of the BSc in Electronics, Robotics, and Mechatronics Engineering, and teach labs for the Foundations of Control and Product Automation courses.

Recognition

Throughout my career, I have been honored with prestigious grants and awards including the Japanese MEXT fellowship, Tohoku University's GP Mech Award, and ESA's Networking Partnering Initiative. I have been invited to give numerous talks and seminars including presenting our work on lunar robotics to the Embassy of Italy in Bern, at the EPFL Space Center Public Seminar Series, at the University of Luxembourg, and at the Space Tech Summit as part of the 50 Global Innovators track.

Last Updated: 2026 July 18