Pedro U. Lima (Ph.D., Full Professor) received the Licenciatura (5 years) and M.Sc degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST in 1984 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. (1994) in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, USA. Currently, he is a Professor at IST, Universidade de Lisboa, and a researcher of the Institute for Systems and Robotics, where he is the Deputy President for Scientific Matters and the coordinator of the Intelligent Robots and Systems group. He is the co-author of two books, and Associate Editor of the Elsevier’s Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems. His research interests lie in the areas of discrete event models of robot tasks and planning under uncertainty, with applications to networked robot systems, e.g., in hospital, home and search and rescue scenarios. He has (co-)supervised successfully 18 PhD students since 2002, and currently (co-)supervises another 6 PhD students.

Pedro Lima was President and founding member of the Portuguese Robotics Society, was National Delegate to EU and ESA Space Robotics programs and was awarded a 6-month Chair of Excellence at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain in 2010.

Pedro is very active in robot competitions, and he is a Trustee of the RoboCup Federation (2003-2012, 2016-), General Chair of RoboCup2004, held in Lisbon, the Coordinator of the FP7 Coordination Action RoCKIn, Coordinator of Indoor competitions of the European Robotics League, and member of the Advisory Board of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC), whose first edition took place in the United Arab Emirates in March 2017.

He has also been very active in the promotion of Science and Technology to the society, through the organization of Robotics events in Portugal, including the Portuguese Robotics Open since 2001.