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About

D. Pastor is a pioneering roboticist whose work pushes the boundaries of autonomous mobility in the most extreme and uncertain environments imaginable—from the granular surfaces of distant ocean worlds to disaster zones on Earth. Their research centers on developing versatile, resilient robotic systems capable of navigating perceptually-degraded terrains where traditional sensors fail. Pastor’s most cited work, "EELS: Towards Autonomous Mobility in Extreme Terrain with a Versatile Snake Robot," (16 citations) introduces a groundbreaking snake-like robot designed for space exploration on moons like Enceladus and Europa, where terrain is unknown and exteroception is unreliable. This work is complemented by "Early Recall, Late Precision," (7 citations) which tackles the critical challenge of multi-robot semantic mapping in search-and-rescue, balancing the need for high recall of targets with operational constraints. Further contributions include "Space Science Opportunities Augmented by Exploration Telepresence" (4 citations), which reimagines human-robot collaboration for planetary science, and "GranularGym" (3 citations), a high-performance simulation framework for robotic tasks involving granular materials. Through these innovations, Pastor is not only advancing autonomous systems for extreme environments but also laying the groundwork for the next era of space exploration and terrestrial disaster response.