Prof. Carme Torras is the Principal Investigador of CLOTHILDE project.

She graduated in applied mathematics and, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, studied Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). Her doctoral thesis (published in Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, Springer-Verlag) on temporal signal processing in motor neurons opened an innovative line of research that has been subsequently explored by the international scientific community. Later she adapted the mechanisms of motor neurocontrol to the learning and planning of robot motion. This is a research line that Prof. Torras has pursued at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRII), where she leads a research team that has been recognized as Consolidated Robotics Group by the Government of Catalonia continuously from 1997 to the present.

The pioneering work of Prof. Torras in the application of neural models to robotics is reflected in the large number of European projects on this subject that she has promoted and led, from the four ESPRIT projects in the period 1992-1995 (SUBSYM, PROMotion, B-LEARN and CONNY), to five projects led in the last decade: PACO-PLUS, GARNICS, IntellAct, I-DRESS and IMAGIN, and her recently awarded ERC Advanced Grant project CLOTHILDE, 2018-2022.

Some of these projects have resulted in technology transfer. In the CONNY project, the IRII group developed two software packages, one for visual positioning of robots for Thomson CSF, which was patented, and another for automatic recalibration of a space robot, which was installed on the mock-up of the International Space Station at Daimler-Benz Aerospace in Bremen. Recently, under the GARNICS project, the patent “Robotized cutting tool and sample extraction” (ES2395931A1, WO2013011180A1) has been published.

The integration in the group of researchers with complementary profiles (industrial, mechanics and telecommunications engineers, experts in artificial intelligence and software engineering, and mathematicians) has helped to address difficult and wide-ranging problems. The wide variety of prestigious journals that have published the results give a good account of it. For example, articles on parallel manipulators are the product of a fruitful collaboration with algebraic geometers, and have appeared in both mathematics and robotics journals with high impact, given the importance of the results obtained for the control of these manipulators.

Prof. Torras has directed 18 doctoral theses and some of her doctoral students are now highly recognized researchers holding academic positions as Professor at EPFL Defitech (José del R. Millán), CSIC Research Professor (Federico Thomas), Professor at the University Canberra (Elisa Martinez), or Professor at UFPR (Eduardo Todt).

She maintains a high dedication to editorial tasks, having been Associate Editor of 9 journals, Associate Vice-President for Publications of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), and Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Prof. Torras has obtained several awards and honors: Narcís Monturiol Medal of the Government of Catalonia (2000), Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (2007), member of the Academia Europaea (2010), member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona (2013), and Fellow of IEEE (2019). She has served in the Administration Committee (AdCom) of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) and in the Advisory Committee of the Spanish Research Agency (AEI).