I am a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute, with research interests covering robot learning, optimal control, geometrical approaches, and human-robot collaboration. I am also a lecturer at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

My work focuses on human-centered robotics applications in which the robots can acquire new skills from only few demonstrations and interactions. It requires the development of models that can exploit the structure and geometry of the acquired data in an efficient way, the development of optimal control techniques that can exploit the learned task variations and coordination patterns, and the development of intuitive interfaces to acquire meaningful demonstrations.

The developed approaches can be applied to a wide range of manipulation skills, with robots that are either close to us (assistive and industrial robots), parts of us (prosthetics and exoskeletons), or far away from us (teleoperation). My research is supported by the European Commission, by the Swiss National Science Foundation, by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, and by the Swiss Innovation Agency.

You can download my research statement in PDF format.

Upcoming or recent invited talks

May 13 2024
ProxyTouch: Whole-body Proxy-Tactile Architectures for Industrial and Service Applications Workshop, IEEE Intl Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'2024), Yokohama, Japan.
Apr 29 2024
Kinematic Aspects of Robotics Workshop, Johann Radon Institute (RICAM), Linz, Austria.
Feb 13 2024
Seminar at the Institute for Cognitive Systems, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany.
Feb 08 2024
Online lecture on Industrial Robotics and Cobotics, course on Cognitive Ergonomics and Neuroergonomics in HRI, IIT Gandhinagar.
Dec 07 2023
Swiss Digital Conference, Sierre, Switzerland.
Nov 21 2023
Colloquium at the Department of Mathematics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland.
Nov 15 2023
Workshop on AI for Robotics, Naver Labs Europe, Grenoble, France.
Nov 08 2023
3-minute pitch at TEDx Martigny, Switzerland.
Oct 26 2023
ReconCycle Summer School, Mallorca, Spain.
Oct 05 2023
6th Workshop on Ergonomic Physical Human-Robot Collaboration: Harnessing Advancements in Robot Learning, IEEE/RSJ Intl Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'2023), Detroit, USA.
Aug 24 2023
AI Olympics With RealAIGym: Is AI Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World? workshop and competition, 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2023, Macao.
Jul 10 2023
Mechanical and Mechatronics Department Research Seminar, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Jul 06 2023
AI for Good Global Summit, United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland.
Jul 05 2023
Workshop on Accelerating sustainable manufacturing with AI, United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland.
Jul 02 2023
Geriatronics Summit, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.
Jun 14 2023

News and updates

Dec 21, 2023
Congratulations to Julius and Ante! Our group won this week the NeurIPS 2023 Robot Air Hockey Challenge (AiRLIHockey Team)!
Dec 21, 2023
Congratulations to Tobias! He received this week the Idiap Best Paper Award 2023 for our T-RO article on geometric algebra!