Get to Know me

Hello, I am Samuel, a PhD student and Teaching Associate at Cardiff University. At the age of 16, my brother introduced me to robotics. Seeming an interesting topic, I tried to build a robotic arm which mimicked my own hand utilising the InMoov project. After many failed attempts, I successfully made it work using Arduinos, flex sensors and servo motors. Within this project, my biggest weakness was the electrical aspects, and thus, I decided to pursue a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

At the age of 18, I enrolled on BEng Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Cardiff University graduating in 2023 with a First Class Honours (ranked 1st in the country in 2023). During my undergraduate studies, I joined the Autonomous Racing Cardiff Team, where I learned about the existence of Robot Operating System (ROS). Fascinated by the complexity and elegance of this middleware, I started testing how to integrate cameras, motors, and additional scripts to interact with the peripherals of the robot. Later in my degree I dicided to expand my studies by adding a year in industry, where I joined IRHOMS research group at the School of Computer Science & Informatics at Cardiff University, helping in the development of autonomous systems applied to robotics. Within my placement, I met Dr Juan D. Hernandez Vega, who saw my interest and lack of knowledge in robotics and taught me through the fundamentals of robotics. Throughout the final year of my degree, I joined the Cardiff University Robotics Team, where, through weekly team meetings discussing articles regarding planning and other research interests of teammates, I expanded my knowledge about autonomous systems in robotics, specifically in planning.

After finishing my degree, I felt like my knowledge of robotics was quite weak, so I decided to undertake a PhD at Cardiff University within the School of Computer Science & Informatics. Since the PhD is about becoming an expert in a specific topic and the field of robotics expands across several areas, I decided to focus on developing autonomous navigation systems for telepresence applications under the supervision of Dr Juan D. Hernandez Vega. Currently, I am enjoying every second of this journey and looking forward to future publications that are under development…

Always welcome to collaborate in developing articles, conferences, events, journals and workshops so please feel free to reach out through social media or send an email!