Enrique Fernandez has a PhD in computer engineering and an extensive background in robotics. His PhD thesis addressed the problem of Path Planning for Autonomous Underwater Gliders, but he also worked on other robotics projects, including SLAM, perception, vision, and control. During his doctorate, he joined the Center of Underwater Robotics Research in the University of Girona, where he developed Visual SLAM and INS modules in ROS for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), and participated in the Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge, Europe (SAUC-E) in 2012, and collaborated in the 2013 edition; in 2012, he was awarded a prize.
During his PhD, Enrique published several conference papers and publications to top robotics conferences, such as the International Conference of Robotics and Automation (ICRA). He has also authored some book chapters and ROS books.
Later, Enrique joined PAL Robotics as a SLAM engineer in June 2013. There he worked with the REEM and REEM-C humanoid robots using ROS software and also contributed to the open source community, mainly to ROS Control repository, being one of the maintainers nowadays. In 2015, he joined Clearpath Robotics to work on the Autonomy team, developing perception algorithms. He has worked on the software that runs on the industrial mobile robots OTTO 1500 and OTTO 100, which has been deployed into the facilities of multiple large industry companies, such as General Electric and John Deere.
