Jonatan Scharff Willners, PhD

I am a postdoctoral research associate at Heriot-Watt University where I am working for ORCA-HUB. My current work focuses on autonomous behaviours related to feasible path-planning for start-to-goal queries and autonomous exploration and inspection. I did my PhD at said university which I finished at the beginning of 2020. The thesis was about cooperative navigation for autonomous marine robots. The thesis can be downloaded here Cooperative Navigation Between Surface and Sub-surface Vehicles.

I am originally from an island in the middle of the Baltic sea, Gotland, which is a part of Sweden. I moved to Västerås, in Sweden (not the same as Game of Thrones!) to study a Master of Science in Engineering in Robotics at MDH, Mälardalens University, a 5 year combined BSc and MSc degree. During the last year, I was part of a group building an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, Naiad, which can be seen below. We went to compete in RoboSub with Naiad in San Diego, CA, US in 2015. This sparked my passion for underwater robotics.

After my finishing my degree MDH, I moved to Linköping to work at SAAB Dynamics’s computer vision department, where I was working on a SLAM project which later was released as a spin-off company, CIND. After a year at SAAB I moved to Edinburgh to continue in the field I am most passionate about, marine robotics. My doctoral studies was a joint collaboration between Heriot-Watt University and Seebyte. During the studies, I also had the opportunity to spend 6 months as a visiting researcher at Australian Centre for Field Robotics.

For contact please feel free to reach out to me at LinkedIn or by mail.