Fernando López Peña

About

Fernando López Peña is a pioneering roboticist whose work focuses on the development of specialized robots for industrial maintenance, particularly in the harsh environments of the maritime and shipyard industries. His major contributions lie in the design of autonomous and semi-autonomous climbing and underwater robots for hull cleaning and grit-blasting operations. Notably, his 2009 paper on a climbing robot for grit blasting, which uses a double sliding platform with permanent magnets, has garnered 31 citations, while his 2012 work on an unsupervised grit-blasting robot for ship hulls has received 39 citations. These innovations address the critical need to replace environmentally unfriendly and hazardous manual operations with efficient robotic solutions. López Peña is perhaps best known for his work on the Lappa robot (2013, 33 citations), a novel non-magnetic underwater hull cleaner that enables regular in-port cleaning, significantly improving ship efficiency. His research also extends to morphologically intelligent underactuated robots (2015, 14 citations) and even mixed reality educational tools for robotics (2011). With over 150 total citations, his work directly impacts industrial sustainability and worker safety.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   EDHMoR: Evolutionary designer of heterogeneous modular robots

   50 citations · 2013
2. 2
   A Robot for the Unsupervised Grit-Blasting of Ship Hulls

   39 citations · 2012
3. 3
   Lappa: A new type of robot for underwater non-magnetic and complex hull cleaning

   33 citations · 2013
4. 4
   Development of a climbing robot for grit blasting operations in shipyards

   31 citations · 2009
5. 5
   Morphologically intelligent underactuated robot for underwater hull cleaning

   14 citations · 2015
6. 6
   Mixed reality educational environment for robotics

   2 citations · 2011

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links