Arturo M. Flores Alvarez
PhD Candidate, Mechanical Engineering · University of California, Los Angeles
Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) · Amazon AI PhD Fellow
I am a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at UCLA, advised by Dennis Hong in the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), and an Amazon AI PhD Fellow. My research focuses on whole-body control for humanoid robots, combining learning-based and model-based methods for useful loco-manipulation scenarios, with a focus on the part that tends to be hardest: getting a learned policy off the simulator and onto real hardware that has to keep standing up.
I hold an M.S. from UCLA (2024) and a B.Sc. in Mechatronics Engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Lima, Peru. I have been an Applied Scientist intern at Amazon Robotics, working on forceful loco-manipulation, and a humanoid whole-body control intern at IHMC, where I led hardware bring-up of the H1-2 control stack. I was an ETH RobotX Fellow in 2023, and before graduate school I worked on switched control of dynamical systems at UNICAMP in Brazil.
In my final years of undergrad and the time right after, I spent much of my time in my university’s space robotics groups, competing in several planetary rover competitions (and winning a few of them). I also organized events with the Space Exploration Project Group of the Space Generation Advisory Council, and in 2021 I served as an analog astronaut on a mission in the Mojave Desert. Designing machines for places people cannot easily reach is still the problem I find most interesting, and that is a big part of why I work on humanoids. The first builders on another world will not be human, but they may well look like us. Ad astra. 🚀
Away from the lab I write, I draw, and I read more science fiction than is strictly defensible.
News
- Sep 2026Finished an Applied Scientist II internship with the Amazon Industrial Robotics group, co-leading two projects submitted to ICRA 2027.
- Sep 2025Completed a humanoid whole-body control internship at IHMC, leading hardware bring-up on the H1-2.
- Jun 2024M.S. in Mechanical Engineering conferred at UCLA.
- Jul 2023Visiting researcher at the Computational Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich.
- Sep 2022Began the PhD at UCLA, joining RoMeLa under Dennis Hong.
- Dec 2019Research internship in control systems at UNICAMP, Brazil.
Publications
Under review
- Dang, A.*, Flores, A. M.*, et al. “HULK: Learning Whole-Body Forceful Loco-Manipulation for Humanoids.” Submitted to IEEE ICRA, 2027.
- Gonzales, J., Flores, A. M., et al. “LIMBO: Learning and Internalizing Model-Free Barrier Objectives for Agile and Safe Whole-Body Control.” Submitted to IEEE ICRA, 2027.
- Flores, A. M., Lintu, N., et al. “Around the World: Unified Learned Locomotion on a 270 g Continuous-Rotation Quadruped.” Submitted to IEEE ICRA, 2027.
* Equal contribution.
Conference
- Flores, A. M., Zargarbashi, F., Liu, H., et al. “Learning to Walk in Costume: Adversarial Motion Priors for Aesthetically Constrained Humanoids.” IEEE Humanoids, 2025. arXiv
- Liu, H., Zhu, M., Flores, A. M., et al. “From Screen to Stage: Kid Cosmo, A Life-Like, Torque-Controlled Humanoid for Entertainment Robotics.” IEEE Humanoids, 2025. Mike Stilman Award arXiv
- Flores, A. M., Morales, A., Campos, G., Gelso, J. “Energy Efficiency Using IOTA Tangle for Greenhouse Agriculture.” Information Management and Big Data (SIMBig 2021), CCIS vol. 1577, Springer, 2022. link
- Cevallos, B., Jamanca, G., Napan, J., Flores, A. M., Vásquez, Y. “FISHER-X: A Bioinspired Robotic Alternative for the Exploration of the Oceanic Environment on a Jupiter’s Moon.” International Astronautical Congress, 2022. link
Journal
- Flores, A. M., Egidio, L. N., Deaecto, G. S. “Cooperative Networked Control Based on a Time-Varying Lyapunov Function.” Journal of Control, Automation and Electrical Systems 32, Springer, 533–542, 2021. doi
Exhibition
- Zhu, M., Liu, H., Flores, A. M., et al. “Kid COSMO: A Humanoid Robot Movie Character.” ICRA EXPO, 2025. Best Exhibition Award
Honors & Awards
- 2025Amazon AI PhD Fellowship
- 2025Mike Stilman Award, IEEE Humanoids
- 2025Best Exhibition Award, ICRA EXPO
- 2024Winner, Adult Size league, RoboCup, Eindhoven
- 2023Winner, Humanoid Free Walk, IEEE Humanoids, Austin
- 2023ETH RobotX Fellowship — 8.9% acceptance rate
- 2021Research Experience for Peruvian Undergraduates (REPU) — mentee
- 2020Finalist, European Rover Challenge
- 2019Telemetry Award, NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge
Platforms
Robots I have worked on, drawn to true relative height — from a 270 g quadruped to a 1.78 m humanoid. On each one the work spans both simulation and deployment on the physical machine. Select a robot for detail.
- MiNI-Q — RoMeLa, UCLA, 2026 (11 cm, 270 g). Simulation and hardware. Unified learned locomotion on a 270 g quadruped with eight continuous-rotation legs; a ~26k-parameter policy runs entirely onboard a dual-ESP32 system at 50 Hz. Submitted to ICRA 2027.
- DARwIn-OP — RoMeLa, UCLA (46 cm). Simulation and hardware. RoMeLa’s open-platform humanoid, and the ancestor of the lab’s later machines.
- High-Torque Humanoid — RoMeLa, UCLA, 2025–26 (90 cm). Simulation and hardware. Full-stack C++ ROS2 control on an in-development platform: hardware integration, multi-threaded state estimation, RL-based locomotion control and template-model-based adaptation for robust real-time walking.
- Booster T1 — RoMeLa, UCLA, 2026 (1.18 m). Simulation and hardware. Reinforcement learning and software lead for RoboCup 2026, migrating ARTEMIS’s model-based ROS2 stack to a learning-based one with an end-to-end RL locomotion pipeline in Isaac Gym.
- Unitree G1 — Amazon Robotics, 2026 (1.32 m). Simulation and hardware. Whole-body control for forceful loco-manipulation, combining model predictive control, control-barrier-function safety layers and learning-based methods.
- ARTEMIS — RoMeLa, UCLA, 2023–24 (1.42 m). Simulation and hardware. Real-time computer vision and ball tracking for soccer. Winner of the Adult Size league at RoboCup 2024, and first place in the Humanoid Free Walk at IEEE Humanoids 2023.
- Kid COSMO — RoMeLa, UCLA, 2024–25 (1.45 m). Simulation and hardware. C++17 upper-body control and a C++ ONNX sim-to-real pipeline for imitation-learning balance and walking. Mike Stilman Award, IEEE Humanoids 2025.
- Unitree H1-2 — IHMC, 2025 (1.78 m). Simulation and hardware. Led hardware bring-up of the whole-body control stack and built a WBMPC robustness testing framework across the Nadia and H1-2 humanoids.
Teaching
- 2023–2025Kinematics of Robotic Systems (graduate) — Teaching Assistant, UCLA MAE
- 2023Introduction to Programming with MATLAB (undergraduate) — Teaching Assistant, UCLA MAE
Press
- El joven peruano que sueña conquistar la NASA “The young Peruvian who dreams of reaching NASA” El Peruano — profile interview, in Spanish
- Investigadores peruanos diseñan pez robot para buscar vida en Europa “Peruvian researchers design a robot fish to search for life on Europa, Jupiter’s moon” La República — research interview on FISHER-X, in Spanish