Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

 

From 2020 till 2023 he was an affiliated researcher at LAAS-CNRS (RIS team), Toulouse, France. From 2020 to 2021 he was an Associate Professor at the University of Twente. From 2014 to 2019 he was a Permanent Researcher at CNRS and the leader of the aerial robotics activities at LAAS-CNRS.  From 2010 to 2013 he was a Research Scientist and then a Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany, and the scientific leader of the group ``Autonomous Robotics and Human Machine Systems''. 

 

He received the Laurea (M.Sc.) degree (summa cum laude) in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in System Engineering (Feb. 2010) from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. In 2009 he was a visiting student at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

 

He received both the French and Italian Professorial Habilitation for Full-professorship (HDR and ASN resp.) from the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse and the Italian Ministry of University and Research in 2016 and 2018, respectively.

 

His main research interests lie in the robotics area, with a special regard to control and estimation problems and applications ranging across motion and physical interaction control, decentralized control/estimation/coordination, haptics, and hardware/software architectures. His main areas of expertise are aerial robotics and multiple-robot systems.

 

He published more than 160 papers in international journals, books, and conferences and gave more than 80 invited talks in international venues since 2010. In 2010 he was awarded with the ``IEEE RAS ICYA Best Paper Award'' for one of his works on Multi-robot Exploration. In 2018 he was a recipient of the 2018 IEEE RAS Most Active Technical Committee Award.

 

He is a Senior Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research since 2023. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics from 2016 until 2021 and he was Senior Editor for IEEE ICRA (the largest and most influential robotics conference in the world) from 2020 until 2023. He has been associate editor of the IEEE Robotics \& Autom. Mag. (2013 to 2016), IEEE ICRA (2014 to 2019), IEEE/RSJ IROS (2014 to 2017) and the IEEE Aerospace and Electric Systems Magazine (2015). 

 

He is the local coordinator of the EU Horizon AutoAssess project, he was the local coordinator of the EU H2020 Aerial-CORE project, he has been local coordinator in the EU H2020 AEROARMS project, the creator of the ANR PRC `The Flying Co-worker' project, and he contributed to the EU FP7 ARCAS project, all focused on aerial robotic manipulation.

He was the project coordinator of JCJC ANR MuRoPhen, co-coordinator of the FlyCrane project, and a was a contributor to PRO-ACT H2020, all focused on multi-robot coordination/manipulation.

 

He co-founded and served for 8 years as the co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Multiple Robot Systems, http://multirobotsystems.org/

 

He co-funded and was the program co-chair of the IEEE-sponsored International Symposium on Multi-robot and Multi-agent Systems (MRS 2017 & 2019). He co-organized the IEEE-RAS-sponsored 2019 and 2016 Summer Schools on Multiple Robot Systems at NUS, Singapore and CTU, Prague, and more than 15 workshops on Multi-robot Systems, Aerial Robots and Teleoperation at IEEE ICRA, IEEE/RSJ IROS, and RSS, among others.

 

Since 2010, he advised 10 Postdoctoral fellows and 13 graduated PhD candidates (8 currently with a tenured position in academia), and he is currently mentoring 8 PhD candidates. In 2019 one of his mentored PhD thesis won three academic awards, among which the 1st place in the French National Award given to PhD theses in the field of Robotics.