The Department of Industrial Electronics (DEI) at the University of Minho proudly announces that its PhD student João Gaspar Oliveira Cunha has won 1st Place – “Best Innovation in HRI NeuroDesign Award 2025”, awarded during the prestigious IEEE RO-MAN 2025 conference.

The winning project, titled “The Neuroevolution of Collaborative Decision-Making in Robotic Assistants”, was developed by Team 9 and supervised by Estela Bicho, Raymond Cuijpers, and Wolfram Erlhagen. The work investigates how robotic assistants can autonomously develop collaborative decision-making capabilities through neuroevolution, enabling more natural, adaptive, and fluid human-robot interaction.

This innovative approach demonstrates how biologically inspired control architectures can lead to robotic behaviors such as emergent cooperation, shared decision-making, and self-organization — without the need for manual fine-tuning. The results highlight the potential for a new generation of neuroadaptive robotic assistants designed to work seamlessly with humans in real-world tasks.

Receiving this international distinction at RO-MAN — one of the world’s leading conferences in Human-Robot Interaction — marks an important milestone for the researcher and reinforces the global visibility of the University of Minho’s contributions to advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive systems.

The DEI congratulates João and his supervisors for this outstanding achievement and looks forward to seeing the continued development and impact of this promising line of research.