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

Jun 2025
Feb 01 2025
Dec 12 2024
Nov 22 2024
Designing Humanoids: How Much Should We Learn from Humans? Workshop, Humanoids'2024, Nancy, France
Nov 15 2024
Selected Topics in Robot Learning seminar, TU Berlin, Science of Intelligence Cluster (SCIoI), Germany.
Nov 06 2024
Sep 27 2024
International Workshop on Open-Ended Learning by Interactive Robots, Sorbonne University, Paris, France.
Aug 29 2024
Empowering Human-Robot Collaboration Workshop, co-organized by the Innovation Booster Robotics, the Innovation Booster Artificial Intelligence, and the Swiss Cobotics Competence Center, Switzerland Innovation Park Biel/Bienne (SIPBB).
Jul 15 2024
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.
May 02 2024
Kinematic Aspects of Robotics Workshop, Johann Radon Institute (RICAM), Linz, Austria.
Apr 26 2024
AI Valais/Wallis Workshop on Human-AI Teaming, Swiss Digital Center, Sierre, Switzerland.
Apr 17 2024
Seminar at Department of Mechanical Engineering, IISc, Bangalore, India.
Apr 16 2024
Workshop on Emerging Technologies and challenges for Exoskeleton, Bangalore, India.
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.

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!