Current work

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). 

Biography

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

From 2009 to 2014, I was a Team Leader at the Department of Advanced Robotics, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). From 2007 to 2009, I was a Postdoc at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory, EPFL. I hold a PhD from EPFL (2007), awarded by the Robotdalen Scientific Award, ABB Award and EPFL-Press Distinction. Other recognitions include Best Paper Award in the journal of Intelligent Service Robotics (ISR, 2017), Best Paper Award at IEEE Ro-Man'2007, Best Poster Award at ICRA'2021 Workshop, Best Presentation Award at CoRL'2019, and Best Paper Award Finalist at IEEE-RAS Humanoids'2009, IEEE/RSJ IROS'2013, ICIRA'2015 and IEEE ICRA'2016. I served as Associate Editor in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and I currently serve as TC Chair on Model-based optimization for robotics for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS).

PUBLICATIONS

The complete list of my publications can be found here: https://calinon.ch/publications.php