Luis Merino

Luis Merino is an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering, Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO), Seville, Spain. He founded and leads the Service Robotics Laboratory and contributed to establishing the Systems Engineering and Automation division at UPO. He served as Vice-Dean for five years and currently coordinates the Computer Science degree program.

• Education: Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Seville (2007), supervised by Anibal Ollero.
• Research: Focuses on cooperative robotic systems, human-robot collaboration, localization/navigation techniques, and machine learning in social robotics.

His work includes leading 2 H2020, 4 FP7, 3 National R&D, and 3 Andalusian regional projects. Notable projects: MBZIRC 2020 (PI), collaboration with Honda Research Institute Japan, and EU-funded initiatives. He advocates for open-source code/datasets and industry technology transfer.

Scientific Awards:

• ABB Award to the Best Doctoral Dissertation on Robotics (2007)
• Best Paper Award at ROBOT2019

Professional Roles: Associate Editor for Image and Vision Computing and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Serves on ICRA/IROS conference program committees. Grant reviewer for FONDECYT (Chile), SBIR (USA), and ERC.