Pol Mestres

About

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at Caltech, advised by Prof. Aaron Ames. I received my PhD in Mechanical Engineering at UC San Diego under the supervision of Prof. Jorge Cortés, and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a B.Sc. in Engineering Physics in 2020 from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, in Barcelona.

My research aims to develop decision-making architectures for autonomous systems in which safety is a formally certifiable property. To do so, I leverage tools from systems and control theory, optimization, uncertainty quantification, and AI.

1. Universal Formulas for Safe Control and their Neural Network Approximations

   P. Mestres, J. Cortés, E. D. Sontag

   Systems and Control Letters, 215 (2026), 106480 · PDF

2. Towards Probabilistically Safe Reinforcement Learning: Theory and Deployment on Humanoid and Aerial Robots

   P. Mestres, V. Gabbita, J. H. K. Siu, S. A. Esteban, H. Serneke, J. W. Burdick, A. D. Ames

   Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC) 2027, submitted · PDF

3. Control Barrier Function-Based Safety Filters: Characterization of Undesired Equilibria, Unbounded Trajectories, and Limit Cycles

   P. Mestres, Y. Chen, E. Dall'Anese, J. Cortés

   Journal of Nonlinear Science, 36 (2026), 41 · PDF

4. Safe and Dynamically-Feasible Motion Planning using Control Lyapunov and Barrier Functions

   P. Mestres, C. Nieto-Granda, J. Cortés

   IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 41 (2025), 6440–6459 · PDF

News

• October 2026I am on the academic job market, seeking tenure-track faculty positions.
• August 2026I attended the 23rd IFAC World Congress in Busan, Republic of Korea.
• May 2026I attended the 2026 American Control Conference in New Orleans, USA.