My work focuses on humanoid locomotion, where I train and deploy whole-body control policies using
reinforcement learning and optimal control. I am also interested in foundation models for robotics,
including LLM-based task planning for general-purpose domestic robots, and I am part of the
SocRob@Home (Mobile Robot) team and the LisTex United (Humanoid Robot) team both competing in RoboCup@Home.
Previously, I spent a semester as an exchange student at KTH Royal
Institute of Technology in Stockholm, studying systems, control, and robotics.
Feel free to send me an e-mail if you want to have a chat! Contact me at: duartefariasantos@gmail.com
Humanoid Locomotion Researcher | ISR-Lisbon, IST
2025 Mar - Current (Lisbon, Portugal)
Master's thesis on humanoid locomotion control and deployment: training whole-body locomotion
policies with reinforcement learning and optimal control, studying sim-to-sim robustness across
physics simulators, and integrating depth-camera perception for stair-climbing and
hazardous-terrain locomotion (advised by Pedro Lima and Rita Cunha).
Assistant Researcher | FOMO-HODOR Project (ISR-Lisbon & UT Austin)
2025 Oct - Current (Lisbon, Portugal / Austin, USA)
Foundation Models for Humanoid Domestic Robots: using large language models to translate
natural-language instructions into high-level task plans and robot-executable code for
RoboCup@Home-style tasks, as part of an international Lisbon-Austin team (working with Peter Stone, Justin Hart and Erez Karpas from UT Austin, and Pedro Lima, Bruno Martins, and Zita Marinho from IST Lisbon).
Member, SocRob@Home | Intelligent Robots and Systems Group, ISR-Lisbon
2025 Apr - Current (Lisbon, Portugal)
Research and competition team for domestic service robots, focusing on human-robot interaction,
perception and sensor fusion, and robust task execution in unstructured indoor environments for
RoboCup@Home international competitions.
Research Internship | Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering INESC-MN
2023 Apr - 2024 March (Lisbon, Portugal)
Developed FPGA-based real-time processing of chemically induced fluorescence signals for cancer cell detection, applying rolling-average smoothing and signal filtering to suppress noise and reduce false-positive fluorescent marker events.
Motion Controller for Natural and Robust Humanoid Locomotion using Reinforcement Learning | Masters Thesis
Founding Member, LisTex United / RoboCup@Home competition team, ISR-Lisbon and UT Austin (2025 - Current)
Participant and Collaborator in EURobin 2026, for ISR-Lisbon, among multiple development hackathons with other participating international research groups, such as Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), German Aerospace Center (DLR), University of Bonn, to name a few, in preparation for the event.
Student Mentor: aided a grad student from the University of Hamburg performing a research internship at ISR-Lisbon, working with establishing a proprietary SDK simulation pipeline for a humanoid robot in Isaac Sim (2026)
Participant at Robocup @Home 2026 South Korea for both the home Lisbon team and the joint Austin-Lisbon team, the latter being among the first to enter the international competition with a humanoid robot
GPA: 18.3 / 20 in the M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, IST
Maximum grade (A) on Erasmus exchange at KTH Royal Institute of Technology
