Looking for Challenges

I earned a Master's degree in Automatic and Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of Seville. During the final years of my studies, I was an undergraduate researcher at GRVC, a leading robotics group with a strong international reputation in aerial and unmanned systems. My work -and Master's thesis- led to a patent, and I continued at GRVC as a graduate researcher to complete the design.

Later, I moved to Austria to work as a mechanical design engineer at FACC, an aeronautical company. The role was both challenging and rewarding, focusing on the design of mechanisms and interior components for business jets. I was recognized as an outstanding mechanical designer, and after saving some money, I decided to pursue my lifelong dream of moving to Japan. Two of my designs, listed in my recommendation letter, were later patented by the company.

I joined the wearables start-up 16Lab in Yokohama as Vice President of Engineering. The company was developing a smart ring, and my role involved creating methods and algorithms to define its interactions. I added five successful patents to my portfolio and contributed to the ring winning the Innovation Award at CEATEC Japan 2015 in the Home Entertainment category. Once the product was fully developed and the company shifted its focus to business development and commercial integration, I left my position at 16Lab to develop my own robotic designs.

I began working with Kim-sensei at Iwate University, where I had full freedom to pursue my own designs while contributing to research on forestry technologies and methodologies aimed at helping elderly populations in rural areas safely cut trees. As for my designs, I applied for two new patents: a robot joint (granted) and a high-ratio gearbox (failed due to a similar patent from Toyota). A few years later, Kim sensei started a new company in Korea, and his laboratory at Iwate University closed. I decided to stay in Iwate, where I was getting married.

I started a family in Iwate and joined my wife in running her cram school, where we taught science, robotics, and programming to children. Life in Iwate was peaceful, and I was able of sharing a lot of time with my daugther, but we wanted to give her a better educational environment and I wanted to continue developing my robotic designs, so after two years we decided to move to Tsukuba.

I joined Tsukuba University as a PhD student to develop my designs as part of my doctoral research in collaboration with the japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). However, as my research group began a collaboration with the Moonshot R&D program, I shifted my focus to inflatable robot arms, specifically designs that could be fabricated on-demand in a future moon station. After only one semester I already had few working prototypes, but we realised that the main bottleneck for large pneumatic robots was the number of hoses neceasary to operate all the actuators, so I shifted again my research topic to pneumatic logic circuits. My first paper on pneumatic logic was presented at ICRA 2025, and an additional paper was published in IEEE Access some months later. The main contribution of my PhD are the Multi-channel Pulse Sequence systems (MCPS) that are the first addressing systems able to control any number of distributed pneumatic devices through a limited number of lines. An additional contribution was the set-reest valve, a novel type of membrane valve that resembles the logic of an electronic SR NAND latch. I will graduate on September 2026.