Francisco Melendez – MAPIR Research Group

PhD student

PhD. student in Human Robot Interaction and Mobile Robotics

Welcome!!

I am Francisco Meléndez Fernández, a PhD student in the Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics group (MAPIR) at the University of Málaga, Spain. My research interests include:

Mobile robot navigation in human environments
Task Planning, Task Execution
Human-Robot Interaction
Service Robotics: Robotic Telepresence, Personal Robotics, Socially Assistive Robotics
System Integration: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks, Ambient Assisted Living environments

Contents

Brief CV
Ongoing Work
Technical Skills
Publications
Contact

Brief CV

I was born in Málaga (Spain) in 1982. I received a B.Sc-M.Sc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Málaga in 2011. In March 2012 I joined the MAPIR group as a Researcher in Ambient Assisted Living applications of Robotic Telepresence. I received the M.Sc in Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence in 2013. Since I joined the MAPIR group, I have been involved in two research projects funded by European Union Programmes, ExCITE and GiraffPlus (2012-2015). In February 2015 I started a PhD in mobile robotics, which is focused on new developments for personal robots aimed at helping people in daily life activities.

Ongoing Work

The first part of the PhD was focused on improvements for a semi-autonomous robotic telepresence system aimed at operating in Ambient Assisted Living contexts, it is now completed and has led to the publication of two conference papers and submission of a journal paper (currently under review). Now, the focus of my work is placed on the development of effective and efficient autonomous behaviors valid for mobile robots in daily life environments (e.g., homes). I am working on plan-based navigation and control strategies for a socially-aware service robot and, In particular, the ongoing work addresses problems arising from finding adequate navigation paths and adapting robot behaviors to maximize the robot acceptability in social contexts.

Technical Skills

During my previous experience as a research assistant engineer and now as a PhD student, I have trained my skills in different areas:

Programming Stuff: C++, Visual Studio, QT Creator, Java, Eclipse, Javascript, HTML5
Robotic Frameworks: ROS, MOOS, OpenMORA, MRPT
Robotics Applications: reactive planning, sensor-based mapping and localization, supervised autonomous navigation, assisted driving, robot teleoperation, robotic telepresence in AAL contexts
Internet of Things: MQTT, AAL sensors, distributed network configuration
Web Development: NodeJS, AngularJS
Multimedia Streaming: WebRTC