Short Research Description

I got my PhD at the University of Chile Computer Science Department in 2020, in the topic of live programming for robotic behaviors. Currently, I am an assistant professor in the Software Engineering Section of the University of Southern Denmark since August 2021. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Unmanned Aerial System Center (UAS Center) of the same university since March 2020. I am particularly interested in improving the way we build software for robots, drones and cyber-physical systems. This includes the way of how we test and validate these software and how developers interact with the software and the systems.

Research Interests

  • Software Engineering
  • Robotics
  • Aerial Robots: Unmanned Aerial Systems
  • Live Programming
  • Software Visualization
  • Software Testing
  • Programming Languages
  • Cyber-Physical Systems

Current Work Situation

I work as an assistant professor in the University of Southern Denmark, in the Software Engineering Section. I am collaborating with the Unmanned Aerial System Center (UAS Center) of the same university in the context of the HealthDrone project. In this project I research the development of software architectures for UAS and the use of Domain Specific Languages to specify UAS missions.

Resources

For publications, you can find my online profiles on: Google Scholar, DBLP and ORCID.

You can see videos of my work on my Youtube account.

For extra information, you can visit my LinkedIn page.

Products

I have developed several robotic softwares:

Organization and Teaching Experience

Cuac non-profit corporation

I am a founding member of Cuac, a non-profit chilean corporation for robotic education founded in 2021. In particular, the corporation focuses on: (i) reaching the general population with down-to-earth robotic concepts; and (ii) teaching robotics to students or teachers who want to teach robotics to students, with a strong focus on gender and social equality on the students (i.e., the corporation actively looks on reducing the gender and social gap of its students).

Robotic Community

In 2016 I co-found the first robotic community in the University of Chile. In this community we bring together all the students in the university that are interested in robotics.

Duckietown Chile

As a result of the robotic community, we raised fundings and implemented a robotic course in the University of Chile inspired by the MIT class Duckietown. We adapted this course from graduate students to second-year engineer students of Chile. We appropriately called this course Duckietown Chile.

The main goal of Duckietown Chile is to introduce robotics to relative young students. We taught robotic concepts using self-driven vehicles as our main example. We incorporated the "business" metaphor of the MIT class, where students are not in a typical course, but they are applying to work in the Duckietown Chile business.

Beauchef Robotics Challenge

In 2018 and 2019 I co-organized the Beauchef Robotics Challenge (BRC) with the robotic community, the digital fabrication laboratory of the University of Chile (FabLab) and the IEEE RAS student chapter of the University of Chile.

In this competition, participants design, build and program their own line follower robots. An example of this type of robots can be found here: video. We have the complete streaming of our competition in facebook (credits to the guys from timer-crono!).

All documents related to BRC are available in our own GitHub page for anyone who wants to reproduce this competition.

Events

I have participated in several events, presenting not only my work, but also the work of my colleagues of the different groups I have been worked.

  • 10/2018: 4º Engineering and Science Festival Link
  • 12/2017: Invited talk in Computer Science Summer School of Cochabamba 2017:
    • I gave a talk about Software Engineering in Robotics and a tutorial about programming self-driven vehicles.
  • 10/2017: Robotics Week Link
  • 06/2016: VII Robotic Meeting Saint George School Link
  • 04/2015: Chile Robotics Day Link
  • 10/2014: 2º Engineering and Science Festival Link

Additional Information

  • Competitive Programming: I participated in the ACM-ICPC competitive programming competition from 2011 to 2015. In 2011, as a member of “los talentosos campesinos” (the talented peasants) team, we won the chilean competition. Then, as a couch, we won every chilean competition. Moreover, in 2012 and 2015 we classified to the world finals. In Chile, I was a member of the organizing team of the First Chilean Training Camp of Competitive Programming (ICPCCL'15). This camp was open for chilean students to prepare them for the upcoming ACM-ICPC competition.