Meet our next ESRs and find out more about their projects:
Andrea Berra (ESR14)
Andrea Berra received his BSc in Automation and his MSc in Automation and Control engineering from Politecnico di Milano, in 2017 and 2020 respectively. In 2020 he started working as a control engineer consultant at Alstom and then as a researcher at Politecnico di Milano, gaining experience in the control research field both from industry and academy. He is currently a PhD student at FADA-CATEC in Seville. His research areas include control engineering for aerial manipulators.
Andrea’s project focuses on developing new guidance and control techniques for aerial robotics during manipulation. Objectives of the project include: (1) develop a localization system based on on-board sensors, (2) design advanced stability and guidance control techniques to guide the robotic arm.
Manuel Jesús Fernández González (ESR 13)
Manuel is a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Denmark, Department of Electrical Engineering
He received his BSc in Telecommunication Engineering and his MSc in Logic, Computing and Artificial Intelligence from University of Seville in 2020 and 2021, respectively. He has been working on aerial robotic projects (H2020 AEROARMS, AEROBI and RESIST among others) at GRVC Robotics Lab in University of Seville as research assistant since 2017. His main research interest is in haptic systems with Virtual Reality to perform autonomous teleoperation tasks using aerial manipulators.
His PhD project focuses on ease the operability of an aerial manipulator for tool manipulation by a remote user. The objectives of the project include:
To develop a skill-based approach for remote tool manipulation by a human user
To identify new ways to provide the user with meaningful information to ease the performance of an operation
To prototype a control station for ease of use of the aerial manipulator by a remote user
To develop the control framework for shared autonomy between the user and the autonomous system, so that the system itself understands whether to fully rely on user inputs an introduce corrections..
Fernando Ruiz Vincueria (ESR6)
Fernando is a PhD candidate at the GRVC Robotics Lab of the University of Seville, currently working on soft aerial robots. He received his bachelor's and master's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Seville, as well as a master's degree in propulsion and energetics from the École Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et d ’Aérotechnique (ISAE-ENSMA), where he was a student researcher. He was also visiting researcher at the California Institute of Technology and did his Master Thesis at Safran Aircraft Engines in Paris.
In 2021 he started working on aerial robotics projects (H2020 HYFLIERS and PILOTING) at GRVC as a research assistant. His thesis will focus on developing a completely soft UAV that guarantees safety in interactions with humans, and whose deformable structure is used favorably in various applications. This objective will have both mechanical and control challenges, for which machine learning techniques will be used.
Tong Hui (ESR5)
Tong Hui is a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Denmark under the Department of Electrical Engineering. She received her BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Tongji University and Politecnico di Milano in 2019 (under the double degree program Poli-Tong) and her MSc in Mechanical Engineering (Mechatronics and Robotic Systems) from Politecnico di Milano in 2021.
She worked at the Italian Institution of Technology as a research fellow under the Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence research line from 2020 to 2021 where she gained experience in whole-body dynamics and nonlinear control on underactuated aerial robotics. Her main research interests are system modeling and control of aerial manipulators interacting with the environment physically, and mechanical hardware design of robotic systems.
Her PhD project aims at overcoming the limitations of floating-based systems while having interaction with the surrounding environments. Some of the possible objectives of the project are:
- mechanisms design that allows exploiting the system dynamics for high force tool manipulation;
- dynamic modeling of the floating-based system physically interacting with the environment;
- control strategy to ensure stable physical interaction and accuracy.
Check out all our ESR projects here.