Journey of Ph.D. Roger Pi: Exploring the Depths of Autonomous Underwater Manipulation and Robotics.
Roger Pi is a Ph.D. student from Catalunya that is currently in the final stages of completing his Ph.D. studies at the Centre d’Investigació en Robòtica Submarina (CIRS), at VICOROB.
Roger Pi obtained his B.Sc degree in Computer Engineering in 2017 at Universitat de Girona.
Then, in the same 2017, he began the Erasmus Mundus master’s in computer Vision and Robotics (VIBOT) , a joint master’s degree from the University of Burgundy, University of Girona, and Heriot-Watt University. In his Master Thesis, he mounted for the first time a dual-arm setup in the Girona500 and developed a motion planning algorithm for it. This work was awarded with the “Best Master Thesis Award” of the academic year 2019.
In June, 2019, he was awarded an FI grant to pursue his Ph.D. thesis in the context of autonomous underwater manipulation, supervised by Dr. Pere Ridao and Dr. Narcís Palomeras. In this line, he has developed projects such as “TWINBOT”, where two Girona500 cooperatively performed a pick, transport, and place operation of a long pipe, or part of the “ATLANTIS” project, where a dual-arm Girona500 performs cathodic protection inspection on a wind-float structure. Moreover, he has participated in operating the robot in biological or oceanographic projects such as ResCap, PLOME, or DEEPERSENSE.