Research Scientist

Dr. Luigi Penco is a roboticist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), specializing in autonomy, teleoperation, and human-robot interfaces for humanoid systems. His research and development work centers on advancing the seamless integration between human operators and autonomous robots.

Dr. Penco leads and contributes to several high-impact research initiatives supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). He has also served as the Principal Investigator (PI) for NASA’s Valkyrie project, which leveraged IHMC’s software framework to enhance the autonomy and usability of NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot. He is now the Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) on ONR’s Squadbot project, focused on developing a robotic platform and autonomy algorithms for building exploration, and on ARL’s Explosive Breaching project, which aims to increase the safety of dismounted infantry by using robots for breaching tasks.

Dr. Penco is Co-Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committee on Telerobotics and actively contributes to the RAS as an associate editor for flagship conferences such as ICRA, IROS, and Humanoids. He has also helped organize major academic events, including the Humanoids 2024 conference and workshops at ICRA conferences.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from Roma Tre University in 2015 and a master’s in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from La Sapienza University of Rome in 2018. In 2022 he received a PhD in Computer Science from Université de Lorraine, while conducting his doctoral studies at Inria Nancy Grand-Est.

During his doctoral research at Inria, he has contributed to the EU H2020 AnDy project on human-robot collaboration. He has developed a teleoperation system for the humanoid robot iCub with the goal of providing an intuitive way to realize complex tasks and to convey collaborative policies to the robot.

He likes avatar technologies, urban style, and more generally being involved in things that look futuristic.