Rate My Professor J Alonso-Mora

Javier Alonso-Mora is a Professor of Mobile and Collaborative Robotics in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Delft University of Technology, where he heads the Autonomous Multi-Robots Laboratory within the Department of Cognitive Robotics. He has been at TU Delft since 2016, advancing from Assistant Professor, following a postdoctoral associate position at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Alonso-Mora earned his Ph.D. in robotics from ETH Zurich's Autonomous Systems Lab, in partnership with Disney Research Zurich. He also obtained a Diploma in Engineering and a Diploma in Mathematics from the Technical University of Barcelona (UPC), participating in the Interdisciplinary Higher Education Centre (CFIS) and the Robotics Institute (IRI). Previously, he served as a Principal Investigator at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute).

His research centers on navigation, motion planning, learning, and control of autonomous mobile robots, emphasizing multi-robot systems, on-demand mobility, and safe interactions with humans in dynamic environments. Applications span mobile manipulation, autonomous vehicles, logistics, and collaborative robotics. Alonso-Mora received the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant in 2021 for the INTERACT project to enable intuitive robot interactions in human-centric settings. Additional honors include the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award (2024), ICRA Best Paper Award on Multi-Robot Systems (2019), Amazon Research Award (2019), Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research VENI award (2017), and the 2025 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Young Researcher/Engineer Award. Key publications feature "On-demand high-capacity ride-sharing via dynamic trip-vehicle assignment" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017), "Planning and decision-making for autonomous vehicles" (Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, 2018), "Social behavior for autonomous vehicles" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019), and "Multi-robot formation control and object transport in dynamic environments via constrained optimization" (International Journal of Robotics Research, 2017). He co-founded The Routing Company from his ride-pooling innovations, co-chairs the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Multi-Robot Systems, and serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Autonomous Robots.