Senior Research Associate

Francesco joins IHMC as a Senior Research Associate in May 2023 to work with Dr. Robert Griffin and the robotics team. He completed his Ph.D. in robotics engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where he also earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. His academic Ph.D. is held in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy, where he is part of the Human-Robot Interfaces and physical Interaction (HRII) (iit.it/hrii) laboratory, under the ADVanced Robotics (ADVR) division. 

He previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Italian National Research Council in Milan, and as a visiting student at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California, where worked on motion planning and Model Predictive Control of a multi-scale swarm of multiple robots. 

Francesco has specialized in optimal control techniques, teleoperation and motion planning of redundant mobile manipulators. In particular, he focused on hierarchical low-level whole-body control for redundant robots and Hierarchical Quadratic Programming (HQP) for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC).  

He joined the IHMC team because he is deeply fascinated by the team’s work and achievements with humanoids robots.