Jorge Peña

Jorge received bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Engineering Physics from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Spain, and its Interdisciplinary Higher Education Centre (CFIS), in 2016. From 2016 to 2018, he joined a master’s degree program obtaining degrees in Electronics Engineering from Fudan University, China, and Embedded Systems from the University of Turku, Finland.

Jorge completed his PhD on Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the University of Turku, Finland, from 2019 to 2022. His research focused on multi-robot collaborative autonomy, distributed robotic systems, and cooperative localization. During his PhD, Jorge visited the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at EPFL, and CATEC in Sevilla, to work on autonomous aerial multi-robot systems. After the PhD, he continued his work with a focus on multi-robot learning and collaborative situational awareness. In June 2023, Jorge led the TIERS team at the ENRICH competition achieving the best drone 3D map and autonomous exploration of the competition area in the Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant in Austria.

Jorge was awarded a Nokia Scholarship in 2019 and in 2020, and a Finnish Foundation for Technology Promotion Grant in 2021. He was also part of a finalist team in the JDD Global Digitalization Challenge in 2019 on multi-sensor fusion for autonomous driving.

Jorge joined the SCAI (Spinal Cord Artificial Intelligence) Lab at ETH Zürich in July 2023 as a Postdoctoral Researcher to work on perception and control for autonomous social navigation in complex environments. His research includes reinforcement learning for social navigation, deep learning for scene understanding, and active perception for improved object tracking and situational awareness.