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About

Ivo Vatavuk is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of field robotics, manipulation, and agricultural automation. His primary contributions focus on developing autonomous systems for precision agriculture, particularly in viticulture—where he has pioneered novel approaches to robotic vine suckering and spraying. Vatavuk’s most cited work, "Task Space Model Predictive Control for Vineyard Spraying with a Mobile Manipulator" (26 citations), introduces a real-time adaptive control framework that enables a mobile manipulator to precisely navigate and treat vine rows. He is a key contributor to the HEKTOR project, a heterogeneous autonomous robotic system for viticulture and mariculture, with two related papers garnering 18 and 16 citations respectively. Beyond agriculture, Vatavuk has advanced legged locomotion through bilevel optimization for precise jump planning, and demonstrated autonomous wall-building with a mobile manipulator at the MBZIRC 2020 competition. His development of a direct-drive, torque-sensing brush tool for compliant vine suckering reflects a commitment to practical, sensor-rich robotic tools that can handle delicate biological tasks. With a growing citation record and a portfolio spanning control theory, system integration, and real-world deployment, Vatavuk is establishing himself as a leading figure in bringing intelligent robotics to challenging agricultural environments.