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

Nov 2025
Focus Period on Robot Learning, Lund University, Sweden.
Jun 25 2025
Gaussian Representations for Robot Autonomy: Challenges and Opportunities, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Los Angeles, USA.
Jun 21 2025
Workshop on Human-Robot Contact and Manipulation, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Los Angeles, USA.
Jun 05 2025
May 23 2025
Beyond the Lab: Robust Planning and Control in Real World Scenarios, IEEE Intl Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, USA.
May 23 2025
Workshop on Language and Semantics of Task and Motion Planning, IEEE Intl Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, USA.
Feb 21 2025
International Humanoid Forum, Switzerland Innovation Park, Biel, Switzerland.
Feb 01 2025
Embodied Agents in Contemporary Visual Art Symposium, Berlin, Germany.
Jan 30 2025
Amazon Robotics, Berlin, Germany.

News and updates

Oct 05, 2024
Congratulations to Alice Guntli who received the well deserved Faulhaber Prize for her EPFL Master thesis co-supervised by Idiap and ABB!
Jul 29, 2024
Our paper Configuration Space Distance Fields for Manipulation Planning by Y. Li, X. Chi, A. Razmjoo and S Calinon is among the three Outstanding Paper Award Finalists at Robotics: Science and Systems 2024.
Jun 13, 2024
Congratulations to Suhan, Teguh and Tobias, co-authors of the article Tensor Train for Global Optimization Problems in Robotics, which received the Best Paper Award (two tied-up winners) from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committee on Model-based Optimization for Robotics, for articles accepted/published in 2023.
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!