Francisco Affonso
Ph.D. student at UIUC
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Girish Chowdhary in the Distributed Autonomous Systems Lab (DASLab). Prior to UIUC I worked with Prof. Marcelo Becker at the University of São Paulo (USP).
Research
My research focuses on advanced robotic systems that learn, adapt, and act in complex, changing outdoor environments. I currently work on loco-manipulation frameworks, combining physics-based models with long-term reasoning for robust task planning and execution in unstructured and uncertain terrain.
Key Areas
- Loco-Manipulation & Whole-Body Control
- Model-Based RL and Sim-to-Real Transfer
- Imitation Learning & Policy Adaptation
- Multi-Modal Vision-Language-Action Models
Selected Publications
CROW: A Self-Supervised Crop Row Navigation Algorithm for Agricultural Fields
Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 111(1):28.
Learning Terrain-Specialized Policies for Adaptive Locomotion in Challenging Environments
IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR).
End-to-End Crop Row Navigation via LiDAR-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR).
Contact
- Emailfaffonso [at] illinois [dot] edu
- ScholarGoogle Scholar
- GitHubgithub.com/faffonso