Francisco Affonso

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).

CV Scholar GitHub X

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

* Equal contribution.

2026

LeCropFollow: Latent Space Planning for Navigation in Unstructured Crop Fields

Felipe Tommaselli, Francisco Affonso, Arthur Pompeu, Gianluca Capezzuto, Arun Narenthiran Sivakumar, Girish Chowdhary, Marcelo Becker.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

[paper] [website] [code]

2026

CTS-MoE: Implicit Terrain Adaptation via Mixture-of-Experts for Perceptive Locomotion

Francisco Affonso, Matheus P. Angarola, Ana Luiza Mineiro, Aditya Potnis, Marcelo Becker, Girish Chowdhary.

Preprint.

[paper] [website]

2025

CROW: A Self-Supervised Crop Row Navigation Algorithm for Agricultural Fields

Francisco Affonso*, Felipe A. G. Tommaselli*, Gianluca Capezzuto, Mateus V. Gasparino, Girish Chowdhary, Marcelo Becker.

Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 111(1):28.

[paper] [code]

2025

Learning Terrain-Specialized Policies for Adaptive Locomotion in Challenging Environments

Matheus P. Angarola*, Francisco Affonso*, Marcelo Becker.

IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR).

[paper]

2025

End-to-End Crop Row Navigation via LiDAR-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning

Ana Luiza Mineiro*, Francisco Affonso*, Marcelo Becker.

IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR).

[paper]

Mentoring

I am always happy to mentor motivated undergraduate and master’s students in CS and ECE. If you are interested in exploring potential research ideas or opportunities, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Contact