João Sousa

Scholar in residence February 2024 – September 2024

João Tasso de Figueiredo Borges de Sousa is a Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department from Porto University in Portugal. He holds a PhD and an MSc in Electrical Engineering, both of which were awarded by the University of Porto. His research interests include autonomous underwater, surface and air vehicles, planning and execution control for networked vehicle systems, optimization and control, cyber-physical systems, and applications of networked vehicle systems to the ocean sciences, security and defence. In 2002, he was awarded the Luso-American Foundation Fellowship by the Portuguese Studies Program at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2008, he received an outstanding teaching award from Porto University.

João heads the Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologias Subaquáticas – LSTS (Underwater Systems and Technologies Laboratory). The LSTS has pioneered the design, construction, and deployment of networked underwater, surface, and air vehicles for ocean sciences and security and defence applications. Major accomplishments include the design of the award-winning Light Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (LSTS) and the LSTS open-source software toolchain for networked vehicle systems, as well as the organization of large-scale experiments at sea, including the annual Rapid Environmental Picture exercise organized in cooperation with the Portuguese Navy since 2010 and with the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation since 2014. The LSTS received the Arca second Prize for the best technological realizations Respectful to Environment in 2003 and the national BES Innovation National Award for designing the Light Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in 2006.

João has fostered and grown a worldwide research community in this field, holding yearly conferences and workshops on hybrid systems, networked vehicle systems, and autonomous underwater vehicles. He has been lecturing on networked vehicle systems at renowned universities in the United States of America and Europe. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Intelligent Robotics for Space Exploration, Rensselaer’s Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, in 1991. He has had several Visiting Scholar appointments at the University of California at Berkeley since 1997. He is a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Multi-robots Systems Technical Committee and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Marine Systems Technical Committee.

João was the chair of the 2013 edition of the IFAC Navigation, Guidance and Control Workshop and is the chair of the 2018 IEEE AUV Symposium. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Swedish Marine Robotics Center. He is on the editorial board of several scientific journals. He is a member of several NATO committees. He has authored over 400 publications, including 50 journal papers.

Contact: jtasso@fe.up.pt