ROMI LAB - Key Persons

Carlos Mastalli

Job Titles:
  • Lab Director
  • Lab Director / Research
Education PhD in robotics Bio Carlos Mastalli received the M.Sc. degree in mechatronics engineering from the Simón Bolı́var University, Caracas, Venezuela, in 2013 and the Ph.D. degree in bio-engineering and robotics from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy, in 2017.* He is currently an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, U.K. He is the Head of the Robot Motor Intelligence (RoMI) Lab affiliated with the National Robotarium and Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. He is also appointed as Research Scientist at IHMC, USA. Previously, he conducted cutting-edge research in several world-leading labs: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy), LAAS-CNRS (France), ETH Z ̈urich (Switzerland), and the University of Edinburgh (UK). Carlos completed my PhD on "Planning and Execution of Dynamic Whole-Body Locomotion on Challenging Terrain" in April 2017 in the Dynamic Legged System lab at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. The central topic of Carlos' research career is how to build general motor intelligence that enables athletic behaviours, dexterous manipulation and sensory-driven motor control. To build such capabilities, my research focuses on both top-down (principles, abstractions) and bottom-down (stimuli, data) approaches. Most of my previous work develops top-down approaches using the formalism of optimal control and numerical optimisation. Those approaches had enabled agile and complex manoeuvres in robots with legs and arms. My publications in robotics top-tier venues such as ICRA, RAL, AURO and TRO are high impact. More recently, I have also been working on deep learning techniques to warm start optimal control solvers (i.e., a memory of motion) and to train neural networks that combine optimisation layers (i.e., differentiate optimal control algorithms)

Daniel Ordoñez

Job Titles:
  • ELLIS Joint PhD Student
  • ELLIS Joint PhD Student / Research
  • Student
Education MSc in Artificial Intelligence Bio Daniel Felipe Ordoñez Apraez is a PhD student of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) doctoral program under the supervision of Dr Claudio Semini (DLS), Dr Massimiliano Pontil (UCL-CSML), and Dr Carlos Mastalli (RoMi). He received a master's degree in artificial intelligence from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-Barcelona Tech) and a Bachelors's degree in mechatronics engineering from the Universidad Nacional De Colombia (UNAL). He previously worked as a research student (and later scientist) at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial under the supervision of Dr Francesc Moreno-Noguer, Dr Mario Martin, and Dr Antonio Agudo in the intersection of computer graphics, robotics, and control for the synthesis of realistic high-speed legged locomotion using Reinforcement Learning techniques, and the study of discrete morphological symmetries of robotic systems. His doctoral project focuses on the intersection of Optimal Control and applied Machine Learning applied to legged robot control, system identification, and disturbance identification.

Jose Rojas

Job Titles:
  • Student
  • Student / Research Interests
Jose Rojas received the BEng degree in Electronic Engineering and the MSc degree in Mechatronic Engineering from the Tecnologico Nacional de Mexico\Instituto Tecnologico de Ensenada, B. C., Mexico in 2018 and 2020, respectively. He is currently a PhD student at the Robot Motor Intalligence (RoMI) Lab of the National Robotarium, Heriot-Watt University under the supervision of Dr. Carlos Mastalli. Previously, he worked as a research fellow at the Dynamic Legged Systems Lab of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) under the supervision of Dr. Claudio Semini. He has conducted research on optimal control for legged locomotion at IIT. His doctoral project focuses on differentiable contact simulators and contact implicit motion/estimation optimization for model predictive control to enable dynamic loco-manipulation in legged robots in challenging scenarios.

Sergi Martínez

Job Titles:
  • Student
  • Student / Research Interests
Education MSc in Automatic Control and Robotics Bio Sergi Martínez received an MSc degree in automatic control and robotics from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in 2022, and a BSc degree in mechatronics, industrial electronics and automatics engineering from the University of Vic (UVIC-UCC), in 2019. He is currently persuading a PhD at Heriot-Watt University under the supervision of Dr Carlos Mastalli. Previously, he worked as a Research Support Engineer at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI-CSIC), under the supervision of Guillem Alenyà. He was in charge of developing robotics applications for cloth manipulation in healthcare tasks. He has also been enrolled within the High Dynamics Group at IRI, where he conducted his master's thesis on embedding actuators dynamics in the optimal control model of a UAM. His doctoral project focuses on combining predictive control techniques with deep learning to enable dynamically-balanced loco-manipulation on legged robots.