Robotics

Dr. Juan Rojas received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University (ranked 15th in the USA). He began studying robotics in the last year of his bachelor degree in 2001. Dr. Rojas has been studying robotics for 16 years. In his Master’s program, he had his first experience with a middleware system: the Intelligent Robotics Architecture (IMA). IMA was a similar program to ROS and was built by students in the Center for Intelligent Systems at Vanderbilt University. In 2011, Dr. Rojas performed a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan. During his time in Japan, Dr. Rojas was exposed to Japan’s main middleware project: OpenRTM. Later in 2012, Dr. Rojas began as an Assistant Professor at the School of Software in Sun-Yat Sen University and began teaching a full ROS course in the Fall of 2012. He started what may be the first academic course on ROS in China. Since then Dr. Rojas has continued to teach a ROS course to undergraduate and graduate student every year. Along the way, Dr. Rojas has lead two translation projects for two ROS texts from English to Chinese. Namely: ROS By Example Volume 1 and 2 from Patrick Goble and are now available online in China under the names of ROS入门实例 and ROS进阶实例. Dr. Rojas has also organized training workshops including the 2017 ROS Summer School in East China Normal University in Shanghai (http://www.robotics.sei.ecnu.edu.cn/ros2017), along with the 2016 GDUT-Gaitech ROS Training Workshop, and the 2015 ROS Summer School hosted by Gaitech. Furthermore, Dr. Rojas actively uses ROS in his research, actively participating in the development of the code. All research code is made available as open source in Github and easily accessible through his research web page at: www.JuanRojas.net/research. Dr. Rojas has published more than 40 publications at international journals, conferences, and workshops.