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Cosimo Della Santina – Assistant professor – Delft University of Technology (Netherlans)

Cosimo Della Santina is Assistant Professor at Cognitive Robotics (CoR), TU Delft. He received his PhD in robotics (cum laude, 2019) from University of Pisa. He was then a visiting PhD student and a postdoc (2017 to 2019) at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 2020, he is affiliated to the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) as external research scientist. For the first eight months of the same year he also held a post doc position at the department of Mathematics and Informatics, Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is now a guest lecturer at the same university. He has been awarded with the 2023 IEEE RAS Early Career Award, euRobotics Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award (2020) and the “Fabrizio Flacco” Young Author Award of the RAS Italian chapter (2019). He also has been a finalist of the European Embedded Control Institute PhD award (2020).

He was involved as PI for a bunch of European and Dutch Projects, including Natural Intelligence, EMERGE, and one of the subprojects of the Agrifood NxtgenHightech and co-director of the Delft AI lab SELF, and a VENI laureate.

His main research interests include model-based control of soft robots, nonlinear control of underactuated mechanical systems, artificial intelligence emerging from mechanical systems, learning physically consistent dynamic models for use in closed-loop control, developing robotic body parts that are physically intelligent without a body: robotic hands, feet, legs, manipulation of deformable objects and articulated soft quadrupeds.

Letizia Gionfrida – Assistant professor – King’s College London (UK)

Letizia Gionfrida is an Assistant Professor (UK Lecturer) in Computer Vision in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London where she directs the Vision in Human Robotics (VHR) Lab. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London on kinematics inference from monocular cameras. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Biorobtics Lab at Harvard University on vision-based algorithms for wearable robotics. In 2023 she joined King’s College London as a Lecturer in Computer Vision.

She is interested in designing, implementing, and evaluating vision-based models to improve diagnostic, rehabilitation, and assistive devices for individuals with mobility impairments. Currently, she is working on vision applications for robotics, with a particular focus on healthcare applications.

Arash Ajoudani – director of the Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction (HRI²) laboratory – Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)

Arash Ajoudani is the director of the Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction (HRI²) laboratory at IIT. He is a recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) proof-of-concept grant 2023 Real-Move and the ERC starting grant 2019 (Ergo-Lean), the coordinator of the Horizon-2020 project SOPHIA, the co-coordinator of the Horizon-2020 project CONCERT, and a principal investigator of the HORIZON-MSCA project RAICAM, and the national projects LABORIUS, COROMAN, and ReFinger. He is a recipient of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Early Career Award 2021, and winner of the SmartCup Liguria award 2023, Amazon Research Awards 2019, of the Solution Award 2019 (MECSPE2019), of the KUKA Innovation Award 2018, of the WeRob best poster award 2018, and of the best student paper award at ROBIO 2013. His PhD thesis was a finalist for the Georges Giralt PhD award 2015 – best European PhD thesis in robotics. He was also a finalist for the best paper award on human-robot interaction at ICRA2024, the best paper award mobile manipulation at IROS 2022, the best paper award at Humanoids 2022 (oral category), the Solution Award 2020 (MECSPE2020), the best conference paper award at Humanoids 2018, the best interactive paper award at Humanoids 2016, the best oral presentation award at Automatica (SIDRA) 2014, and for the best manipulation paper award at ICRA 2012.

He is the author of the book “Transferring Human Impedance Regulation Skills to Robots” in the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR), and several publications in journals, international conferences, and book chapters. He is currently serving as an elected IEEE RAS AdCom member (2022-2024), and as chair and representative of the IEEE-RAS Young Professionals Committee, and as a Senior Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR). He has been serving as a member of scientific advisory committee and as an associate editor for several international journals and conferences such as IEEE RAL, ICRA, IROS, ICORR, etc. He is a scholar of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). His main research interests are in physical human-robot interaction, mobile manipulation, robust and adaptive control, assistive robotics, and tele-robotics.

Francesco Ferro (PAL) – CEO Pal Robotics (Spain)

Francesco Ferro is the CEO and co-founder of PAL Robotics, one of the top service robotics companies in the world. He received a BSc+MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering at Politecnico di Torino in 2002 (Italy), a Master at ISEN (Lille, France) and an Executive MBA at the University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2011. In 2004 he founded PAL Robotics, in 2008 Francesco became the manager of PAL Robotics software department and then he was appointed as CEO of the company in 2011. Passionate about the development of collaborative humanoid robots, Francesco oversaw production of the first fully autonomous biped robot in Europe. Now one of the leading robotics companies in the world, PAL Robotics is involved in a wide range of European research projects and collaborations that aim to improve our everyday lives. Over the last years, the award-winning company has successfully built robots for services and research, contributed to open-source projects and participated in several major robotics competitions.