Henrique Ferrolho

Cross-team strategy planning, roadmap setting, bridging team silos. Motion planning, motor control, testing and validation for a custom 6-DoF robot arm. End-effector pose (jog) controller for motor servoing for both gamepad teleoperation and autonomous visual servoing. Bring-up of a custom end-effector for driving heavy duty screws into timber. Development of all layers above mechanical and electrical design: sensor and motor drivers integration, embedded software, system services, and interface definitions to higher-level application clients.

Developing robotic mobility and manipulation systems for construction environments. Quadrupedal robot trajectory planning, control, and functional validation: individual motors in a testbench > single robot leg on a test stand with linear rails > fully assembled quadruped robot. Whole-body trajectory planning with full dynamics for: standing up, crawling, trotting, jumping, and lying down.

Worked on a custom end-effector that combined a two-finger gripper with a vacuum gripper with two rotating suction cups of different sizes. As seen in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvPfrEsb89M from t=3:00 onwards. Implemented the drivers, and developed the algorithms for control and teleoperation of the gripper (via keyboard, gamepad, and HTC Vive). Used Machine Learning to train neural networks for: grasp classification, slip detection, and anomaly detection.

Developing robot manipulation solutions for picking and placing tens of thousands of products of varying shapes, sizes, weights, and fragility.

Worked on the ORCA Hub project (orcahub.org) ─ Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets. Developed loco-manipulation capabilities for an industrial quadruped robot mounted with an arm.

PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, with a focus on robust motion planning using trajectory optimization. Experience with numerical optimization, whole-body control, and rigid-body dynamics. Hands-on laboratory experience with complex robot platforms: • NASA Valkyrie (humanoid) • TALOS (humanoid) • ANYmal B (quadruped) • Kinova Jaco (manipulator)

Lab Demonstrator and Marker for the course 'Robotics: Science and Systems'. • Responsible for guiding and supervising a class of 28 MSc students. • Helped the students design, build, and program an autonomous LEGO robot. • Marked the final project demos and reports.

Worked on the Open Humanoids Project: an integrated humanoid control, planning and perception system. Developed by MIT and the University of Edinburgh for the Boston Dynamics Atlas and the NASA Valkyrie.

Developed DokuWeaki (dokuweaki.github.io), a collaborative real-time editor plugin for DokuWiki. Improved existing DokuWiki plugins and packaged them in an installable bundle.

Taught computer graphics (meshes, visibility, lighting, and shading) to two MSc classes. Contributed to the development of WebCGF, a WebGL-based library still being used in the course.

Taught two classes (~15 students each) of the 'Computer Laboratory' MSc course. • Tutorials included OOP in C, Bash scripting, VESA graphics, and state machines. • Contributed to a ~10% increase in the number of approved students. • Wrote guides for developing a game from scratch in Minix.

Worked on "Nutriscience", an award-winning European project that improved the nutrition and eating habits of ~1500 households. Designed and implemented a responsive online platform for the project using Laravel. Liaised with a team of designers, nutrition specialists, and multimedia creators.