Long Bio

My first experience in robotics research was during my diploma thesis 2011 at the University of Patras, Greece, under the supervision of Prof. Antony Tzes. I explored probabilistic filtering based methods, specifically Particle Filters, towards adressing the SLAM problem for a mobile ground robot. Being fascinated from my first experience in the field, in January 2012 I moved abroad and joined the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). At DLR, I primarily worked with Dr. Máximo Roa and numerous other great colleagues on grasp planning, grasp simulations, physics engines and software development. During this period I got familiar with many robotic areas, co-published a number of papers and actively participated in two European projects, namely SMErobotics and EUROC. Driven by my belief that learning is the key towards developing truly intelligent robots. In September 2015 I decided to enhance my education on Machine Learning and Intelligent Robotics, joining the MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. My MSc thesis was on the interdisciplinary area of bio-robotics, under the supervision of Prof. Barbara Webb. During my thesis I developed an onmi-directional robot with 360-degrees vision, that immitates the behaviour of fiddler crabs under predation. During my MSc I also had the luck to get to know Prof. Sethu Vijayakumar, which led to my enrollment at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ECR) in September 2016 as a PhD student. My PhD studies were supported in full by the Honda Research Institute Europe Fellowship as part of the HRI-EU European Graduate Network and were conducted under Prof. Sethu Vijayakumar’s and Dr. Michael Gienger’s supervision. I completed my PhD studies in 2021 on the topic of Human-Robot Collaboration and continued working as Research Associate at the SLMC group at the University of Edinburgh. In 2022, I was a Visiting Scientist at the IRG at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, for 3 months, where I was adviced by Prof. Julie Shah and I investigate topics related to estimation and planning for Human-Robot assistive tasks. My visit at MIT was supported in part by a Postdoctoral Grant provided by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA). I am now a Senior Scientist at the Honda Research Institute Europe working towards developing robots that assist humans in daily tasks.