JJM
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INESC TEC · CRAS · Porto, PT
João Jacob Martins
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
01

Projects

Media coming soon
Flagship · 2024-present

MANTIS - UAV for indoor logistics

A drone platform for autonomous warehouse inventory: GPS-denied flight between racks, on-board detection of rack and label targets, and spatially selective perception that reads only the rack in front of it. Runs on constrained edge hardware where attention modules and CoordConv are off the table - solved instead with geometric channel hijacking and annotation-driven regions of attention. Includes a landing + charging pad and RL obstacle avoidance.

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.

06

Side projects

Agriculture · ongoing

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.