Home Page of Pedro U. Lima

Scientific activity

Educational activity

• Trustee of the RoboCup Federation,
• Cátedra de Excelencia (6 months) offered by the Board of Governors of the U. Carlos III de Madrid: sabbatical leave at the Robotics Lab from 1 Feb to 31 July 2010
• Co-Coordinator of the European Special Interest Group on Cooperative Robotics
• Member of the Organizing Committee of the Robótica 2011 - Festival Nacional de Robótica
• Multi-Robots Special Track Chair of AAMAS'08
• General Co-Chair of RoboCup 2004
• Member of the Scientific Committee of the Festival Nacional de Robótica, 1st Portuguese Robotics Competition and Congress Event.
• Founding Elected President and current Vice-President of IEEE Portugal RAS Chapter
• Principal Investigator of the Formation Estimation Methodologies for Distributed Spacecraft project, funded by ESA, European Space Agency
• Coordinator of the SocRob project
• Check other R and D projects
• Member of the editorial board of the Elsevier Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems
• Member of the editorial board of the IN-TECH International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
• Member of the editorial board of the former International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems, published by World Scientific Publishers
• Member of the Editorial Board of the Portuguese journal Robótica.
• Main organizer of the Festival Internacional de Ciência e Tecnologia, held in Loures, Portugal, 1997, the first international robot competition held in Portugal.
• Member of NASA Center for Intelligent Robotic System for Space Exploration - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, between 1990 and 1994

Publications

You may check my publications list, including books I co-authored with Dejan Milutinovic in 2007 and George Saridis in 1996.
Google Scholar citations' public profile.

Service and Outreach

• Elected member of the new IST Scientific Council (July 2009 - 2010)
• Deputy Vice-President for Scientific Affairs of IST Scientific Board (March 2007 - July 2009)
• Portuguese National Delegate to EC FP7 Space Programme Committee
• Portuguese National Delegate to ESA Programme Board for Human Spaceflight Microgravity and Exploration (PB-HME)
• Vice-President, past President (2009-2011), Founding Member (and No. 1 Associate) of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Robótica,
• Distributed and Cognitive Robotics Focus Area Coordinator in theIST/EPFL Joint Doctoral Initiative

Students

Past PhD students:

• Paulo Tabuada - finished 4 Jan, 2002
• Dejan Milutinovic - finished 20 Sep, 2004
• Porfírio Silva (PhD Philosophy - Fac. Letras, U. Lisboa) - finished 12 Oct, 2007
• Valdinei Silva (co-tutela com Escola Politécnica da U. São Paulo)- finished 7 April, 2009
• Sónia Marques - finished 16 Jul, 2009
• Hugo Costelha - finished 27 Oct, 2010
• Gonçalo Neto - finished 17 Nov, 2010
• Abdolkarim Pahliani - finished 30 Mar, 2012

My current PhD students are:

• Bruno Lacerda (PDEEC) - proposal defended successfully
• João Messias (PDEEC, co-advisor Matthijs Spaan, U. Delft) - proposal defended successfully
• Aamir Ahmad (PDEEC) - proposal defended successfully
• Meysam Basiri (PDEEC/IST/EPFL, co-advisor Dario Floreano, EPFL) - proposal defended successfully (at EPFL)
• José N. Pereira (PDEEC/IST/EPFL, co-advisor Alcherio Martinoli, EPFL) - proposal defended successfully (at EPFL)
• Pedro Fazenda (SSE/MIT-Pt) - was already at MIT under the co-supervision of Prof. Una-May O'Reilly

A list of ex-students and where they are now.

Disciplinas/Courses

• Portfolio (MEEC) (2011/12)
• Autonomous Systems (MEEC) (2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2010/11)
• Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (PDEEC) (2004/2005, 2007/08, 2009/10)
• Advanced Robotics (PDEEC) (2011/12, 2009/10, 2010/11)
• Robótica (MEEC, MEIC, MEBiom) (1996-98, 2002/2003, 2006/07, 2010/11)
• Inteligência Artificial e Sistemas de Decisão (LEEC, LEA, MEEC) (2005/2006, 2006/2007)
• Automação de Processos Industriais (LEEC, MEEC) (2005/2006)
• Robótica Móvel (MEEC, MEIC, LEEC, LEIC) (2004/2005)
• Controlo (LEEC) (2003/2004)

Promotion of Science and Technology

• RoboCup
• Robótica 2011 - Festival Nacional de Robótica
• Robótica 2003 - Festival Nacional de Robótica
• Projecto RODITAS - Robots Didácticos para Técnicos de Automação de Sistemas
• Ocupação Científica de Jovens nas Férias

MSc Theses

Mestrado Bolonha 2011/2012 (MEEC)

• Controlo de Posse de Objecto por Robot Omnidireccional (Fábio Grego)
• Design and Development of an Omnidirectional Soccer Robot (João Sousa)
• Moving Robots Tracking in Dynamic Environments (Pedro Agostinho)
• Sensor and Actuator Hardware for Soccer Robots (Miguel Serafim)

Mestrado Bolonha 2011/2012 (MEAeroespacial)

• Cooperative Aerial Gripper (Simão Duarte)

Mestrado Bolonha 2010/2011 (MEEC)

• Formation Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (quadcopters): vision and control (Henrique Silva)

Mestrado Bolonha 2010/2011 (MEIC)

• Formation Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (quadcopters): middleware (Américo Ambrósio)
• Distributed Middleware and Development System for Multi-Robot Systems (João Reis)

Other

• Check my favorite poem (in Portuguese). I wish I could live like that...

• Art and Robots - The future?

• Perhaps the most beautiful reference to the Sep 11, 2001 events in NYC, and a great hymn for peace, by Carl Sagan, a great scientist who was not afraid of talking about science to non-scientists

• Music with no links - Just listen! (Peter Gabriel, Joe Jackson, Sting, Trovante, Rui Veloso, ...)

• Sporting Clube de Portugal

Quem Nao Arrisca Nao Petisca! (popular, Portuguese)

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. (Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, computer scientist and educator)