Official Bio

Dr. Juan is a Technical Group Lead in the Artificial Intelligence Group, Planning and Execution Section, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

Juan holds a B.Sc and M.Sc in Computer Engineering from the University of Castilla-La-Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Juan previously worked for over 10 years on technology development for the European Space Agency (ESA) in the area of Artificial Intelligence, particularly mission planning and robotic frameworks. For the last 5 years at ESA, he was part of the core-team on the Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign as Surface Operations System Engineer, with responsibilities in the campaign surface phase architecture definition, requirements definition, Sample Fetch Rover (SFR) surface mission definition and feasibility analysis, technical support for SFR on-board autonomy and technical lead for the Integrated Breadboarding activities to deploy and test autonomous on-board software on SFR testbeds.

Selected Publications