Senior Research Associate

Dr. Luigi Penco is a roboticist at IHMC and focuses on developing autonomous and semi-autonomous behaviors for humanoid robots, as well as user interfaces for their control. He is interested in teleoperation systems, impact-aware control strategies and behavior generation, coordination and adaptation methods.

He works in a number of projects focusing on advancing humanoid robots. These include projects from Office of Naval Research, DEVCOM, and NASA Johnson Space Center, mostly centering around the development of humanoid behaviors for urban exploration, robotic breaching and perception of these environments.

A native of Rome, 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 robotics 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.