      
      INESC TEC · CRAS · Porto, PT

João Jacob Martins

Building UAVs that perceive, decide, and fly - Anywhere.

Robotics engineer and researcher across the full UAV stack - RL-driven navigation, ML perception on edge hardware, sensor fusion, and platforms deployed from warehouses to offshore wind and agriculture.

Projects Publications

Current

PhD candidate - RL for UAV localization & navigation

Since 2023

Researcher, INESC TEC + Invited Assistant Professor, ISEP

Stack

ROS/ROS 2 · PX4 · PyTorch · CUDA · Isaac Gym

Projects

Flagship · 2024-present

MANTIS - UAV for indoor logistics operations

A drone platform for autonomous warehouse inventory, built around RL-driven navigation and localization: deep reinforcement learning policies for GPS-denied flight between racks, deep VIO for on-board localization, and RL obstacle avoidance - all running on constrained edge hardware. Perception adds spatially selective detection of rack and label targets via geometric channel hijacking and annotation-driven regions of attention.

YOLOv8n edge inference DRIVOLUTION LSA dataset

Read the paper →

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Publications

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Curriculum

Full PDF ↓

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Research interests

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Teaching & supervision

ISEP · since 2023

Invited Assistant Professor · Oct 2023 - present

Lectures & labs at ISEP

Theoretical lectures and practical classes across the CTeSP, BSc in Electrotechnical & Computer Engineering, MSc in Autonomous Systems and MSc in Artificial Intelligence.

Supervision · INESC TEC

MSc thesis co-supervision

Co-supervisor of a Master’s thesis in Autonomous Systems - UAV ML perception, localization and navigation in indoor and outdoor scenarios.

Side projects

Agricultureongoing

Agricultural spraying drones

UAV solutions for major farming associations in northern Portugal - the leading service is spraying phytosanitary products on crops.

Competition · 2019-2022

National Robotics Festival - Factory 4.0

Senior-division warehouse navigation: a ≤30×30 cm robot transporting a box, localizing only with ARUCO tags scattered around the arena.

Biotech2020

Heart-on-a-Chip

Led the electrical team building an organ-on-chip platform to test drugs on live cardiac cells - a step toward replacing animal testing, with Micronit at Saxion University.

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07 · Contact

Open to research collaborations and robotics roles.

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