Summary

I'm a PhD student at Técnico and researcher at ISR/LARSyS, working on robot task planning with Large Language Models. I focus on enabling robots to understand and act on natural language commands.

Education

• Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico.

  2025--Present
  Thesis title: Adaptive Planning for Natural Human-Robot Interaction: Real-Time Multimodal Feedback and Hierarchical Goal Reasoning
• M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico.

  2022--2024
  Thesis title: End-to-End Robot Task Planning from Transcriptions of Voice Commands
• B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico.

  2019--2022

Employment History

• Team Member & Researcher, SocRob@Home.

  2022--Present
  Research on intelligent robotic systems for home environments, focusing on General Purpose Service Robots (GPSR) and natural language command execution.

Publications

Conference Papers

• A. Certo, B. Martins, C. Azevedo and P. U. Lima, "Large Language Model-Based Robot Task Planning from Voice Command Transcriptions," 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Hangzhou, China, 2025, pp. 21018-21023, doi: 10.1109/IROS60139.2025.11246378.

Technical Articles & Blog Posts

• P. Bordalo-Machado, A. Certo, R. Serra, R. Coimbra, H. Jain, and D. Soni. "AI-Driven Task & Motion Planning for Service Robots with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure," Oracle AI & Data Science Blog. (Dec. 2025), url: https://blogs.oracle.com/ai-and-datascience/ai-driven-task-motion-planningservice-robots-with-oci.

Fellowships, Honors & Awards

• FCT Doctoral Studentship (Bolsa de Doutoramento), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

  2025 -- 2029
  Fully funded 4-year individual PhD fellowship for research in LLM-based robot task planning.
• Joy in Motion Academic Award, Critical TechWorks / Instituto Superior Técnico.

  2024
  Awarded for developing an assistive navigation project supporting blind pedestrians.

Research Projects & Collaborations

• FOMO-HODOR: Foundation Models for Humanoid Domestic Robots -- Researcher

  2025 -- 2026
  FCT / UT Austin Portugal Program (Ref: 10.54499/2024.14126.UTA)

  Contributing to LLM and foundation model integration for service robotics task planning.
• Oracle OCI Task & Motion Planning Pilot -- Lead Contributor

  2025
  Industry Collaboration with Oracle AI & Data Science

  Developed AI-driven task and motion planning pipelines for domestic service robots using OCI Generative AI tools.

Academic Activities & Outreach

Talks & Presentations

• Large Language Model-Based Robot Task Planning from Voice Command Transcriptions, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025) (Hangzhou, China).

  Oct 2025
  Oral paper presentation.
• Language-Guided Robot Task Planning: From Transcriptions to Context-Aware Actions, ELLIS Lisbon PhD and Postdoc Symposium (Lisbon, Portugal).

  Oct 2025
  Poster and oral presentation.
• Research Pitch, 2025 LARSyS Annual Meeting (Lisbon, Portugal).

  Jul 2025
  Pitch presentation on M.Sc. thesis outcomes.

Mentorship & Supervision

• Pedro Pereira (M.Sc. Thesis in Electrical and Computer Engineering)

  2026 -- Present
  Co-Supervisor (with Prof. Pedro U. Lima) -- “Active Preference Elicitation and Memory Architectures for LLM-Based Social Humanoid Task Planning”

  Instituto Superior Técnico
• António Morais (M.Sc. Thesis in Electrical and Computer Engineering)

  2025 -- Present
  Technical Advisor (with Prof. Pedro U. Lima & Prof. Bruno Martins) -- “Towards More Natural Human-Robot Interaction Using Full-Duplex Speech Frameworks”

  Instituto Superior Técnico
• Diogo Falcão (B.Sc. Capstone Project)

  2025
  Mentor -- “Enhancing Robotic Perception with Open-Set Object and Human Feature Detection”

  Instituto Superior Técnico
• Vítor Fonseca (SocRob@Home Team Mentorship)

  2025 -- Present
  Team Mentor -- “Object Perception and Automatic Point-Cloud Segmentation for Semantic Mapping”

  Instituto Superior Técnico
• Beatriz Pimenta (SocRob@Home Team Mentorship)

  2025 -- Present
  Team Mentor -- “Speech Pipeline and Skill Implementation for RoboCup”

  Instituto Superior Técnico

Competitions & Fieldwork

• euROBIN European Parliament Research Showcase, European Parliament (Brussels, Belgium).

  Sep 2026
  Demonstrated cooperative AI and service robotics research outcomes directly to EU policymakers.
• RoboCup@Home, SocRob@Home & Listex@Home Teams (Incheon, South Korea).

  Jul 2026
  Benchmarked LLM task planning pipelines with SocRob@Home while providing software integration and field support for the joint Listex@Home humanoid initiative (IST / UT Austin).
• euROBIN Coopetition 2024 (Nancy, France).

  Nov 2024
  Participated in multi-institutional benchmarking, sharing software publicly to promote collaboration and reproducibility in robotics research.
• RoboCup@Home, SocRob@Home Team (Eindhoven, Netherlands).

  Jul 2024
  Achieved 3rd place overall, testing LLM-based task planning systems in realistic domestic scenarios.
• RoboCup@Home Portugal Open, SocRob@Home Team (Paredes de Coura, Portugal).

  May 2024
  First live deployment and realistic benchmark testing of the LLM-based task planner developed for M.Sc. research.
• RoboCup@Home, SocRob@Home Team (Bordeaux, France).

  Jul 2023
  Achieved 2nd place overall and won the Best GPSR Award, benchmarking autonomous service systems in complex environments.

Outreach & Public Engagement

• European Researchers' Night, Pavilhão do Conhecimento (Lisbon, Portugal).

  Sep 2025
  Interactive public demonstrations showcasing humanoid robot capabilities to engage visitors of all ages in science and technology.
• 26th Anniversary of Pavilhão do Conhecimento, Pavilhão do Conhecimento (Lisbon, Portugal).

  Jul 2025
  Live interactive demonstrations featuring a humanoid robot as part of the science center's annual anniversary celebration.
• High School STEM Outreach & Robotics Demos, Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal).

  2024 -- Present
  Hosted interactive live demonstrations on the SocRob@Home testbed for visiting high school students, introducing core concepts in service robotics and perception.

Leadership & Community

• Scout Leader & Youth Mentor, Associação de Escoteiros de Portugal.

  2016 -- Present
  Led youth groups in outdoor expeditions and community service projects, while mentoring scouts in STEM initiatives including the ESA and Raspberry Pi Foundation 'Mission Zero' program. Spearheaded the digital transition to virtual activities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Maker, HackerSchool (Instituto Superior Técnico).

  2019 -- 2023
  Developed open-source hardware/software projects, including 'HSTable' (a DIY interactive smart table) and a mechanical physical Turing Machine. Facilitated technical workshops on programming and electronics, and served on the Marketing & Communications team (2021--2022) managing recruitment campaigns and project promotions.