Pedro Roque

roque at caltech.edu

Gates-Thomas Laboratory, Room 212

Caltech, Pasadena, CA

USA

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Burdick Lab, with the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Caltech. I completed my Ph.D. at KTH in 2024, where I was supervised by Prof. Dimos Dimarogonas, and co-supervised by Prof. Mikael Johansson, and Prof. Jana Tumova.

I focus on practically applicable theoretical results. In short, I am extremely motivated to work on problems that can directly contribute to system performance and enhanced capabilities, particularly in the domains of aerial and space robotics - being them from an algorithmic, control-theoretic, or computational perspective. I am fond of open-source software and hardware, and actively contribute (or have contributed) to the NASA Astrobee and PX4, which I have used in my research through test sessions on the International Space Station and indoor flight arenas.

Currently, I hold the main responsibility to setup a Space Robotics Laboratory at KTH, associated with the Space Center and the WASP NEST DISCOWER project. In DISCOWER, I collaborate with a fantastic group of 3 other fellow Ph.D. students, 2 master students, 6 Professors and one Post-doc. For more information about DISCOWER, visit the website here.

My research interests revolve around the topics of:

Space Robotics: weightless robotics (DISCOWER Github), collaborative robotics (Space Cobot) and exploration robotics (MoonHopper);
Control Theory: model predictive control (on-orbit ReSWARM) and collaborative load transportation (ICRA 2022 Outstand Coordination Award);
Computer Vision: visual-servoing, distributed vision systems.

News

Aug 14, 2025	Starting today, I’ll be a Postdoc Researcher at Caltech, in the Burdick Lab within the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I’m excited to work with Prof. Joel Burdick and the rest of the team!
Oct 7, 2024	Today I’ve defended my Ph.D. thesis titled “Predictive and Vision-based Control for Multi-Agent Aerial and Space Systems”! The thesis is available in the Publications Tab.
Nov 5, 2023	I am happy to announce that today I start a 4 month internship at JPL, within the Maritime and Multi-Agent Systems group led by Dr. Amir Rahmani. Excited to see what we come up with!
Sep 26, 2023	Today, DISCOWER demo‘ed our new Space Robotics Laboratory at KTH ITRL to Digital Futures, SAAB AB, SAAB Inc., and Purdue scholars. This was the first demo of our new facilities!
Jul 12, 2023	I’m happy to share that our work on “Corridor MPC for Multi-Agent Inspection of Orbiting Structures”, with Gregorio Marchesini and Dimos V. Dimarogonas was accepted for oral presentation at IEEE CDC 2023!

Selected Publications

Towards Open-Source and Modular Space Systems with ATMOS

Pedro Roque, Sujet Phodapol, Elias Krantz, and 11 more authors

In 2025

Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{roque2025opensourcemodularspacesystems,
  title = {Towards Open-Source and Modular Space Systems with ATMOS},
  author = {Roque, Pedro and Phodapol, Sujet and Krantz, Elias and Lim, Jaeyoung and Verhagen, Joris and Jiang, Frank and Dorner, David and Siegwart, Roland and Stenius, Ivan and Tibert, Gunnar and Mao, Huina and Tumova, Jana and Fuglesang, Christer and Dimarogonas, Dimos V.},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2501.16973},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
}

Multi-Agent Formation Control using Epipolar Constraints

Pedro Roque, Pedro Miraldo, and Dimos V Dimarogonas

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2024

Bib PDF Code

@article{roque2024multi,
  title = {Multi-Agent Formation Control using Epipolar Constraints},
  author = {Roque, Pedro and Miraldo, Pedro and Dimarogonas, Dimos V},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {IEEE},
}

ICRA 2022 Outstanding Coordination Award

Decentralized Model Predictive Control for Equilibrium-based Collaborative UAV Bar Transportation

Roberto C. Sundin, Pedro Roque, and Dimos V. Dimarogonas

In 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022

Bib PDF Video

@inproceedings{9811726,
  author = {Sundin, Roberto C. and Roque, Pedro and Dimarogonas, Dimos V.},
  booktitle = {2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  title = {Decentralized Model Predictive Control for Equilibrium-based Collaborative UAV Bar Transportation},
  year = {2022},
  pages = {4915-4921},
  doi = {10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811726},
  award = {ICRA 2022 Outstanding Coordination Award},
}