Pedro U. Lima
Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Microsistemas e Nanotecnologias, Instituto Superior Técnico, Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa, University of Lisbon, INESC TEC, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento, Freie Universität Berlin, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Robotics Research (United States), Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Institute for Biotechnology and Bioengineering, CBot (Sweden)
Papers
153
Total Citations
2,823
H-Index
30
About
Pedro U. Lima is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans multi-robot systems, formal task planning, and autonomous decision-making. Based at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Lima has made lasting contributions to how robots coordinate, plan, and perceive their environments, with his most-cited works accumulating hundreds of citations across the robotics and artificial intelligence communities. Among his most influential contributions is the development of Petri Net Plans, a rigorous framework for representing and executing robot task plans that bridges formal modeling with real-world robotic execution (110 citations). His foundational work on multi-agent formation feasibility established systematic methods for ensuring kinematic and coordination constraints in robot teams, satellites, and aircraft (110 citations). Lima has also advanced stochastic population-level control for large robotic swarms, enabling scalable modeling without prohibitive computational complexity (82 citations). His research extends to cooperative localization and target tracking using sparse optimization, as well as decision-theoretic planning for active perception under uncertainty. A longtime advocate for RoboCup as a scientific benchmark, Lima co-authored the visionary "Road to RoboCup 2050" paper (75 citations) and has championed rigorous competition-based benchmarking methodologies for cognitive robotics (71 citations). His body of work profoundly shapes how autonomous multi-robot systems are designed, analyzed, and evaluated.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Motion feasibility of multi-agent formations110 citations · 2005
- 2Petri Net Plans110 citations · 2010
- 3Multi-Robot Systems89 citations · 2005
- 4Modeling and Optimal Centralized Control of a Large-Size Robotic Population82 citations · 2006
- 5The road to RoboCup 205075 citations · 2002
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- 9Omni-directional catadioptric vision for soccer robots62 citations · 2001
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