Olac Fuentes

About

Olac Fuentes is a robotics and machine learning researcher whose work has made significant contributions to two interconnected domains: autonomous robot navigation and dextrous robotic manipulation. His research pioneered the application of predictive sparse distributed memory — a self-organizing neural network architecture — to enable mobile robots to autonomously acquire perception-based navigational behaviors, work that has accumulated over 50 citations across multiple publications. Equally influential is his sustained investigation into dextrous manipulation with multifingered robot hands, where he developed innovative approaches that circumvent the need for prior object models, instead deriving all necessary information directly from onboard sensors. His concept of "virtual tools" offered an elegant solution to the computational challenges inherent in controlling high-degree-of-freedom robotic systems, drawing inspiration from biological manipulators such as the human hand. Fuentes also applied evolutionary strategies to enable robots to autonomously learn complex manipulation primitives, using human hand heuristics to make the learning tractable. Spanning nearly a decade of foundational work from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, his research laid important groundwork for modern autonomous robotics, particularly in bridging sensory perception with intelligent motor control.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Hierarchical Learning of Navigational Behaviors in an Autonomous Robot using a Predictive Sparse Distributed Memory

   33 citations · 1998
2. 2
   Acquiring visual-motor models for precision manipulation with robot hands

   23 citations · 1996
3. 3
   Learning Navigational Behaviors Using a Predictive Sparse Distributed Memory

   21 citations · 1996
4. 4
   Learning Dextrous Manipulation Skills for Multifingered Robot Hands Using the Evolution Strategy

   15 citations · 1998
5. 5
   Learning Dextrous Manipulation Skills for Multifingered Robot Hands Using the Evolution Strategy

   12 citations · 1998
6. 6
   Experiments on dextrous manipulation without prior object models

   12 citations · 2002
7. 7
   The virtual tool approach to dextrous telemanipulation

   10 citations · 2002
8. 8
   Morphing Hands and Virtual Tools (or What Good is an Extra Degree of Freedom

   8 citations · 1994
9. 9
   Learning dextrous manipulation skills using the evolution strategy

   7 citations · 2002
10. 10
    Hierarchical Learning of Navigational Behaviors in an Autonomous Robot using a Predictive Sparse Distributed Memory

    6 citations · 1998

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links