Cesar Lopez Martinez

César López’s research focuses on designing navigation and control algorithms for robots operating in a semi-open world. The concept of semi-openness there are a limited set of potential events and artifacts in the world that may or may not occur, given the current task at hand. To account for this, César’s methods focus on ways of exploiting the semantic information of the environment, and the task at hand, to determine the robot’s actions, whose decision process should be explicit and traceable to the world model of the environment. In turn, these methods also allow for more interpretable (and therefore explainable) navigation and control algorithms, which he thinks is necessary to increase robot’s acceptance in environments shared with humans.  López is especially interested in applying his research in real-life scenarios, his involvement in industry helps him to better understand the actual challenges encountered by robots operating in the field.