Zaplana Agut, Isiah

Isiah Zaplana (Cartagena, 1989) completed his bachelor’s and master’s studies in Mathematics in 2013 (Universidad de Murcia and Universitat Politècnica de Valencia). Then, he was granted a national fellowship to pursue his PhD’s studies at the Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering (IOC) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where his PhD project focused on the development of several geometric and numerical methods to deal with two classical problems in robot kinematics, namely the inverse kinematics and the singularity identification problem. After finishing his PhD in 2018, he moved to Italy to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Advanced Robotics Department of the Italian Institute of Technology. There, he complemented his background by learning about industrial robotics, automation and applied machine learning. From 2021 to 2022, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of KU Leuven (Belgium), where he used and applied all his previous background (especially applied geometry, robotics and machine learning) to the development of robotic strategies for the optimal disassembly of electric and electronic devices. In particular, he has geometrically characterized both the object to be disassembled and the obstacles present in the workspace to compute an optimal free-from-obstacles trajectory for the robot to execute its task.

Finally, in December 2022, he rejoined the IOC at UPC as a María Zambrano Postdoctoral Fellow. He subsequently obtained an assistant professorship and, since July 2026, has served as an associate professor of robotics and computer vision at UPC. His research interests lie at the intersection of applied mathematics, artificial intelligence, and robotics. In particular, his work focuses on the development of intelligent and efficient strategies for robotic manipulation.

Personal webpage: https://web.ioc.upc.edu/isiahzaplana/