**Reza Ghabcheloo**

Reza Ghabcheloo received his BSc degree in Electronics from the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) and his MSc degree in Control Engineering from the K.N Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He then received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal in 2007 with his thesis titled "Coordinated Path Following of Multiple Autonomous Vehicles". Important visits during his doctoral studies included to the Dept. of Engineering Cybernetics of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), California, USA.

From 2007–2008, he was a postdoc researcher with the Instituto Superior Tecnico, Institute ´ for Systems and Robotics, Lisbon, Portugal, where he conducted research on networked control systems. He then moved to Finland as a senior researcher from 2008–2014 with the Department of Intelligent Hydraulics and Automation of Tampere University of Technology, Finland working within the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence on Generic Intelligent Machines. In 2015, he started an Associate Professor position with Tampere University and, since then, has been teaching several courses including the Fundamentals of Mobile Robots, Advanced Robotics, Electrohydraulic Servo Systems, and Autonomous Mobile Machines. Since 2018 he has led the curriculum planning team for Robotics in Tampere University.

He is the founder of the autonomous mobile machines research group at the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences of Tampere University. His research interests include the intersection of robotics and working machines, optimization and machine learning, motion control, and perception. He has published over 80 journal and conference articles in these areas. His motto is to conduct practically relevant research rooted in solid theory. He has a strong position of trust among the leading working machine industry, with eight of his doctoral students co-supervised by industry partners in the field of heavy duty mobile machinery.

#### **Antonio M. Pascoal**

MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD degree in Control Science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA in 1983 and 1987, respectively. He is currently a senior researcher and Associate Professor of Control and Robotics at the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR) of IST. He is the coordinator of the Thematic Line Ocean Exploration and Exploitation of the Laboratory for Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS). He was an Adjunct Scientist with the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India from 2012–2014 and a Visiting Faculty with the Department of Ocean vii Engineering, IIT Madras, under the Indian Sparc Programme, from 2018–2022. He has coordinated and participated in a large number of international projects that have led to the design, development, and field-testing of single and multiple autonomous marine and air vehicles and systems in cooperation with partners in India, USA, Korea, Brazil, Peru, and Europe.

He has been a member of the International Program Committees of numerous conferences on dynamical systems and control and marine and aerial robotics. He has supervised or co-supervised 11 postdoctoral and 15 PhD students. He has published a total of 113 books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal papers, and more than 260 conference papers (12,423 citations, h-index 59, i10-index 241/ Google Scholar). He received the IEEE OES AUV Distinguished Lifetime Technical Achievement Award in 2020.

His expertise includes Dynamical Systems Theory, Marine Robotics, Navigation, Guidance, and Control of Autonomous Vehicles, and Networked Control and Estimation with applications to air and underwater robots.
