About Me

Hi! My name is João Mendes, and I am a PhD student in Aerospace Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico and the Laboratory for Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS), supervised by Prof. Rodrigo Ventura and Dr. Meysam Basiri.

My research focuses on developing autonomous motion-planning frameworks for UAVs to enable efficient and reliable 3D reconstruction of large-scale dynamic environments. I am particularly interested in integrating next-best-view strategies, real-time mapping, target tracking, and autonomous exploration to allow aerial robots to perceive and act intelligently in scenes where objects move, structures evolve, and uncertainty is unavoidable.

During my M.Sc. thesis with the AERO.NEXT Portugal agenda and Tekever, I developed UAV motion-planning algorithms for 3D reconstruction and validated them experimentally, achieving significant performance gains. However, this work also revealed a critical limitation shared by most state-of-the-art frameworks: they assume static environments. This gap directly motivated my PhD, where I now focus on extending reconstruction and planning techniques to dynamic, uncertain, and evolving scenes.

My current goal is to design a unified UAV planning framework capable of actively reconstructing dynamic objects, combining tracking-aware mapping and dynamic-object–aware NBV strategies within a real-time architecture suitable for deployment on real aerial platforms.

Keywords: autonomous 3D exploration; 3D mapping; motion and path planning; aerial systems; perception and autonomy; autonomous agents