Team

The people behind CUCR.

Principal investigators, researchers, students, and collaborators working across the group's research areas — and the graduates who came before.

Faculty

Principal Investigators

Juan David Hernández Vega

Juan David Hernández Vega

Principal Investigator

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, and former Director of Postgraduate Research studies. His research focuses on motion planning, autonomous navigation, robot decision-making, and human–robot collaboration. He has over 10 years of robotics experience across academia and industry, including work on underwater robots, automated valet parking, collaborative robotics, and autonomous systems simulation.

PlanningNavigationRobot Learning
Victor Romero-Cano

Victor Romero-Cano

Principal Investigator

Academic in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, within the Human-centred Computing research unit, working in robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. His research focuses on advancing robot perception and machine learning technologies to make autonomous systems ubiquitous and practically useful across diverse real-world environments.

PerceptionMachine LearningAutonomous Systems

Walter Colombo

Principal Investigator

Doctoral

PhD Researchers

Emin Safa Tok

Emin Safa Tok

PhD Researcher

PhD researcher in the Computational Robotics team, working on learning-based methods for autonomous robots that perceive and act in real-world environments.

PerceptionAI
Furkan Duman

Furkan Duman

PhD Researcher

A mechatronics engineer and PhD candidate in Computer Science at Cardiff University, researching learning-based hybrid motion planning for robotic manipulators, with a particular emphasis on object manipulation planning in constrained environments.

Ioannis-Marios Stavropoulos

Ioannis-Marios Stavropoulos

PhD Researcher

PhD candidate and Teaching Associate at Cardiff University researching robot supervisory control via immersive interfaces under communication constraints.

Jose Patiño

Jose Patiño

PhD Researcher

Samuel Millan-Norman

Samuel Millan-Norman

PhD Researcher

Steven Silva

Steven Silva

PhD Researcher

Mechatronics engineer from ESPOL in Ecuador, and now a teacher at Cardiff University, pursuing a PhD on social robot navigation.

Path PlanningHuman-Robot Interaction
Yuanzhi He

Yuanzhi He

PhD Researcher

PhD candidate focusing on reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms, and generative models for sample-efficient motion planning on long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks.

Robotic ManipulationReinforcement LearningGenerative AI
Zitian Ding

Zitian Ding

PhD Researcher

Partners

Collaborators

Collaborator name

Research Collaborator

Partner institution

A short description of an external collaborator or partner institution.

Alumni

PhD Graduates

  • Jamie Doe PhD 2026 Robotics Engineer, Example Company
  • Casey Doe PhD 2025 Research Scientist, Example Lab
  • Robin Doe PhD 2025 Postdoctoral Researcher, Example University