Profile

Isabel Ribeiro is a retired Full Professor and Distinguished Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). She received her PhD (1988) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST and her Habilitation (Agregação) (2000) from the Technical University of Lisbon in Control and Robotics. She cofounded the Institute for Systems and Robotics, a research unit that is part of the Associate Laboratory LARSyS (Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems), where she is a Senior-Researcher. At IST she was Vice-President of the Governing Board, the School Council and the Scientific Council.

She is expert in mobile robotics, a scientific field that she pioneered in Portugal. Her scientific interests include navigation, localization, mapping, trajectory planning, and probabilistic methodologies in mobile robotics, and multi-robot coordination. She authored 1 book and authored/co-authored 150+ scientific publications. She has given talks at conferences and is a regular speaker at schools to introduce young people to the field of robotics.

She was responsible at IST for a joint project with EFACEC that developed and installed, for the first time in Portugal, a system of Automated Guided Vehicles for automatic transportation of materials in factories, responsible and/or member of the research team of R&D projects funded by EU Framework Programs and Portuguese entities, director of a project under the NATO Science for Stability Program, responsible for R&D projects in mobile robotics under the European Fusion Program integrated in the work of ITER(International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor).

She is Corresponding Member of the Portuguese Academy of Sciences and an Advisory Member of the Ordem dos Engenheiros. She was selected by the National Agency Ciência Viva as one of the “Women in Science”. IST awarded her (2018) the title of Distinguished Professor in recognition of her “exceptional and pioneering contributions to advanced training and scientific leadership in the field of mobile robotics”.