Mario Prats

Mario Prats's picture
Short biography: 
  • Winner of the Georges Giralt Award 2011Since December 2013 I'm a Research Scientist at Google, Mountain View, CA.
  • October 2012 - September 2013. Research Engineer at Willow Garage, Menlo Park, CA.
  • Ph.D. by Jaume-I University (June 2009) entitled "Robot Physical Interaction through the combination of Vision, Tactile and Force Feedback”. Received EURON Georges Giralt Award 2011, Robotdalen International Scientific Award Honorable Mention 2009 and finalist of the CEA-GTRob award to the best PhD thesis on Robotics
  • Master Degree in Computer Science Engineering at Jaume-I University, Castellón (March 2004).
  • Computer Science Engineering at Jaume-I University, Castellón (2003)
Reseach area: 

My research in the IRS group was focused on developing autonomous manipulation systems for performing underwater tasks. The problem is very similar to the mobile manipulation problem, but normally with more degrees of freedom. In fact, an underwater vehicle typically has four DOF, but some of them can be controlled even on the six DOF. The degrees of freedom of the manipulator have to be added to these. In addition to the problem of controlling a high number of degrees of freedom, the vehicle cannot easily keep its pose while the manipulator is doing the task. On the contrary, the vehicle is a floating platform that tries to keep the pose as accurately as possible, but is highly affected by underwater currents, coupled dynamics, etc. This means that the manipulation task has to be normally performed under some motion of the base. Finally, vision also suffers from the underwater environment because of the bad visibility, floating particles, color attenuation, etc. All these facts make autonomous underwater manipulation a challenging problems that is worth researching. This research was carried out in the context of the RAUVI and TRIDENT projects. For more info have a look to my personal blog. Details on my previous research on manipulation for assistive robots is available at my website on the Robotic Intelligence Lab.