Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia
Robotics PhD at KU Leuven.
I am a Ph.D. researcher at the MECO Research Team at KU Leuven, supervised by Prof. Jan Swevers. My research revolves around safe motion planning and robust control applied to autonomous systems in water, ground, and air. I focus my work on real-world applications and validations, aiming to develop robots that increase safety and efficiency in dull or dangerous tasks.
Alongside my graduate studies, between 2021 and 2024, I was a recurrent visiting researcher at MIT’s CSAIL and the Senseable City Lab, working with Prof. Daniela Rus. I hold an M.S. in Engineering (2022) and a B.S. in Mechatronics Engineering (2020) from Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico. There, I conducted my undergraduate and master’s research within the Cyber-Physical Systems group under the supervision of Prof. Herman Castañeda. During my undergraduate studies, I also completed a research stay at the Aerospace Mechatronics Lab at McGill University with Prof. Inna Sharf, and led the student group VantTec in multiple RoboNation competitions.
news
| Aug 03, 2026 | “Adaptive Unmanned Surface Vehicle Control Under Perturbations with a Tunable Settling Time” was accepted in the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. This work represents the main result from my master thesis, where we present an adaptive integral terminal sliding mode formulation for trajectory tracking. |
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| Jul 27, 2026 | “Multi-Agent Motion Planning on Industrial Magnetic Levitation Platforms: A Hybrid ADMM-HOCBF approach” has been published in European Journal of Control. This publication is part of the Special Issue on the European Control Conference 2026. |
| Jun 11, 2026 | “Constant-Rate Convergence for an Adaptive Sliding Mode Controller Using a Fixed-time Disturbance Observer” was accepted in International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control. This research was in collaboration with Tecnológico de Monterrey and Université de Technologie de Compiègne. |
| Jun 08, 2026 | I recently traveled to Vienna, Austria for ICRA 2026. I presented our paper on fast motion planning for unicycle-like robots using a rectangular corridor abstraction of structured environments. |
| May 22, 2026 | “Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotic Boats” was accepted in Nature Communications. This paper introduces FloatForm, a modular system for autonomous self-assembly and collective motion on water. This is a result of a multi-year collaboration that began during my time as a visiting researcher at MIT. |
| May 08, 2026 | Our paper on safe time-optimal point-to-point motion planning and control was accepted to CCTA 2026. This work was led by Felix, a TUM PhD researcher who visited MECO at KU Leuven. |
| Mar 15, 2026 | Our paper on safe distributed motion planning has been accepted to ECC 2026. This publication originated from the thesis work of Bavo and Stan, two former master’s students I co-advised. |
| Jan 31, 2026 | Our paper on fast motion planning for non-holonomic AMRs was accepted to ICRA 2026. This research is part of the ARENA project and incorporates thesis contributions from Sebastiaan, a former master’s student I co-advised. |
