Carlos Balaguer

Carlos Balaguer received his Ph.D. in Automation from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), Spain in 1983. From 1983-1994 he was with the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation of the UPM as Associated Professor. Since 1996, he has been a Full Professor of the Robotics Lab at the University Carlos III of Madrid. He has been Director of the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation (2006-2007) and the vice-Rector for Research of the university in the period of 2007-2015. Prof. Balaguer´s research has included, but not limited, humanoids robotics, robots' design and development, robot control, path & task planning, force-torque control, assistive and service robots, rehabilitation and medical robots, climbing robots, robotics and automation in construction, human-robot interaction. He participates in numerous EU projects since 1989, like Eureka projects SAMCA, AMR y GEO; Esprit projects ROCCO and CEROS; Brite project FutureHome; IST project MATS; 6FP IP projects ManuBuild, I3CON, Tunconstruct; Strep project RobotCWE; 7FP project RoboSpect; and H2020 projects STAMS and BADGER (coordinator). He has published more than 200 papers in journals and conference proceedings, and several books in the field of robotics. He is a member of IEEE and IFAC, and former President of IAARC (2001-2004). He participates in the European networks Euron and Clawar. Prof. Balaguer had been also an Associate Editor of IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine (2000-2005) and is member of the Editorial Board of Automation in Construction journal (Elsevier). He was the coordinator of the Spanish Robotic Network (2005-2009) and of the Madrid Community universities' consortium RoboCity2030 on Service Robots (2006-2018), and was the Spanish representative in the European platform EUROP (2006-2008). He is currently member of the euRobotics Board of Directors (2015 -). He is also Chairman of the Council for Science and Technology of the Community of Madrid (2016 -). He received several awards, among them the best book Fundamentos de robotica edited by McGraw-Hill (1988), best paper of the ISARC'2003 in Eindhoven (The Netherlands), IMSERSO´s Award 2004 for assistive robots research, the Industrial Robot journal Innovation Award of the Clawar'2005 in London (UK), Tucker-Hasegawa Award 2006 in Tokyo (Japan) for a major contribution in the field of Robotics & Automation in Construction and FUE´s Award 2014 for AIRBUS-UC3M Joint R&D Center. He was the General Chair of the IEEE-RAS Humanoids'2014 conference and is the General Chair of the IEEE/JRS IROS'2018 to be held in Madrid.