Personal information
Biography
Estela Bicho (DEng, MSc, PhD, Habil), is a Full Professor of the Department of Industrial Electronics, School of Engineering (EEUM), at the University of Minho (UMinho), integrated member of the Algoritmi Research Centre, where she coordinates the Control, Automation and Robotics Group (Research line Industrial Electronics) and leads the MAR Lab - Mobile and Anthropomorphic Robotics Lab.
She was Associate Director of the Research Center Algoritmi (2013-2015), and vice-president of EEUM in charge of interaction with society (2019-2022).
She obtained her PhD degree in Robotics, Automation and Control in 1999 from the University of Minho, Portugal. In 1995-99 she was a member of the 'Equipe de Dynamique', at the 'Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences Cognitives' at CNRS in Marseille, France. She has been PI, or Co-PI, in several national and international projects (FP5, FP6, FP7, H2020-PT, FCT) in the area of ICT / Robotics and Health care.
Her research focuses on uni- and multi-robot systems, human-robot interaction & collaboration, machine learning, uni- and bimanual robotic manipulation, autonomous navigation, intelligent vehicles aware of their occupants, medical robotics and medical devices for the study and diagnosis of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and neuro-rehabilitation.
She is co-author of more than 100 indexed (e.g. ISI, Scopus) publications in international high-quality peer-reviewed journals (e.g. Mechanism and Machine Theory, International Journal of Robotics Systems, Autonomous Robots, Neural Networks, Robotics and Autonomous Systems) and conferences (e.g. IROS, ICRA). She has been a reviewer/evaluator in service of the European Commission and has been a reviewer in several journals on robotics. She supervised 12 PhD theses and co-supervised 2. She has supervised more than 35 MSc dissertations. She has received several awards and distinctions, including: her PhD work received the 1999 Portuguese IBM Honour Award; the results of the robotics work on Human-Robot Joint action - with connections to neurosciences, developed by the UMinho team in the scope of the European project JAST- , were considered one of the success stories of robotics research in Europe ("Results that Lead the Way", ICT success stories "JAST- Robots get the power of prediction"); the video "The Power of Prediction: Robots that Read Intentions", Bicho et al, which summarised the work done by the UMinho team within the European project JAST was nominated for the six finalists of the Jubilee video award of the 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, an award that aimed to recognise works illustrating the history and/or milestones of intelligent robotics research in the last 25 years. In 2019, her PhD students, Weronika Wojtak, Flora Ferreira and Paulo Vicente, won a third prize in the elimination round of the "International Brain-Inspired Computing Competition" in Beijing, China, which brought together 200 teams from all over the world, where we presented a robot that learns sequences about what to do and when, then uses them flexibly in various contexts of human-robot interaction and collaboration; recently.
RoboHub nominated her as one of the "50 Women in Robotics you need to know about in 2021".
Activities
Employment (1)
Funding (26)
2022.13948.BD
2022.13737.BDANA
PTDC/EEI-ROB/3488/2021
SFRH/BD/151365/2021
T476732472-00028157
PD/128183/2016
SFRH/BD/114923/2016
SFRH/BD/124912/2016
SAICTPAC/0036/2015
NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000026
NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000026
iFACTORY Nº 002814
iFACTORY Nº 002814
SFRH/BD/86499/2012
PIIF-GA-2011-30115 - Proj. Nº301155
SFRH / BPD / 71874 / 2010
POCI/V.5/A0119/2005
SFRH/BD/23821/2005
CONC-REEQ/17/2001
IST-2-003747-IP
POSI/SRI/38051/2001
IST-2000-29689