Sylvain Calinon
Nationality: Swiss
EPFL STI IEM LIDIAP
ELD 241 (Bâtiment ELD)
Station 11
1015 Lausanne
Website: https://idiap.epfl.ch/
EPFL › VPA › VPA-AVP-DLE › AVP-DLE-EDOC › EDEE-ENS
Expertise
robot learning, human-robot collaboration, optimal control, model-based optimization
I am a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at EPFL, with research interests covering robot learning, optimal control, geometrical approaches, and human-robot collaboration.
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.
Teaching & PhD
PhD Students
Yiming Li, Ante Maric, Teng Xue, Cem Bilaloglu, Martin Schonger, Yan Zhang
Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector
Ajay Tanwani (2018), Noémie Laure Gwendoline Jaquier (2020), Emmanuel Pignat (2021), Thibaut Antoine Kulak (2021), Teguh Santoso Lembono (2022), Hakan Girgin (2023), Suhan Narayana Shetty (2024), Jankowski Julius Maximilian (2025), Tobias Löw (2025), Amirreza Razmjoo Fard (2026)