Andres Gongora

Biography

I am a postdoc researcher at the Machine Perception and Autonomous Intelligent Robotics (MAPIR) group, at the Univerity of Malaga, researching new technologies to improve the sensory capabilities of mobile robots.

I was born in Schaffhausen (Switzerland) in 1990, close to the German border, and soon after moved to south Spain at the age of 8. There I started to develop a strong curiosity for information technologies and electronics in general (I used to take our HiFi apart to “improve” its reception, something of which my parents were not precisely enthusiastic about). Still, my family supported me all along and years later I found myself studying at the University of Malaga, where I received my B.Sc in Industrial Engineering specialized in Electronics (2012), my B.Sc in Electronic Engineering (2014), and my M.Sc in Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (2015).

It was during these years that small UAVs, and drones in particular, emerged with great strength. Obviously I wanted to build my own, but it had to be fully autonomous and capable of serious on-board computation. This got me eventually into the MAPIR research group in 2014, where I subsequently started my PhD. Although I still have a long way to go, I had so far the chance to work with embedded systems, ROS, and telepresence, and to be lecturer for several subjects related to computer science and robotics.