Francisco Affonso
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I will conduct research in the Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory (DASLab) under the supervision of Professor Girish Chowdhary. Prior to this, I was engaged in research at the University of São Paulo (USP), under the mentorship of Professor Marcelo Becker. My previous work focused on robotics and artificial intelligence, with particular emphasis on the development of systems for locomotion and autonomous navigation.
Research Interests
My research aims to create advanced robotic systems that can learn, adapt, and interact seamlessly within complex, changing environments. I work across robotics and machine learning domains, with a primary focus on reinforcement learning and optimal control strategies. My current efforts extend to loco-manipulation, where robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation to act effectively in dynamic settings. Recently, I’ve also been exploring imitation learning and multi-modal models that bring together vision, language, and action understanding.
Key areas I currently explore include:
- Loco-Manipulation and Whole-Body Control
- Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (Real-World Models)
- Imitation Learning and Policy Transfer
- Large-Scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models
Selected Publications
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CROW: A Self-Supervised Crop Row Navigation Algorithm for Agricultural FieldsJournal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 2025 PDF
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Navigating with Finesse: Leveraging Neural Network-based Lidar Perception and iLQR Control for Intelligent Agriculture RoboticsIEEE Latin American Robotics Symposium (LARS), 2023 PDF