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About

Ricard Campos is a leading researcher in marine robotics and autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) navigation, with a focus on perception, mapping, and multi-vehicle coordination in challenging underwater environments. His major contributions include the development of advanced 3D surface reconstruction methods for optical mapping of the seafloor, enabling detailed representation from unstructured point clouds acquired by downward-looking sensors. Campos has also pioneered multi-vehicle trajectory alignment techniques that fuse acoustic and optical constraints, allowing cooperative mapping with minimal communication overhead—a critical advancement for deep-sea exploration. His work on the "Underwater caves sonar data set" (60 citations) provides a benchmark for sonar-based mapping in unstructured cave environments, while his "Exploring the Seafloor with Underwater Robots" survey (19 citations) offers a comprehensive overview of the field. Notably, Campos contributed to the ROBUST EU Horizon 2020 project, developing control and perception frameworks for deep-sea mining exploration, and has recently advanced digital-twin strategies for marine ecosystem monitoring. With over 200 citations across his most-cited works, Campos’s research directly supports safer, more efficient autonomous operations in extreme underwater settings, from archaeological sites to mining zones.