Research Associate

Stefan Fasano is a Control Engineering Research Associate at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), specializing in motion control, integration, bringup, and simulation-informed design. He has a passion for bringing robots to life while making their APIs easy to use and their device data interpretable for his fellow engineers.

Stefan currently co-leads bringup, integration, testing, and low-level software design for IHMC’s Alex humanoid, the primary research platform for IHMC’s high-performance legged robotics research. Previously, Stefan has performed similar work for the Link and Eva exoskeleton systems. In addition to his involvement with IHMC’s in-house-designed robotic systems, Stefan has also represented IHMC in a consulting capacity during the system-level design phase of humanoids for external collaborators. Stefan’s primary research contributions have included model-based high-speed locomotion for humanoids, and virtual model control-based assistance algorithms for wearable exoskeletons, with additional contributions including whole-body VR teleoperation of humanoids and reachability-constrained footstep adjustment for push recovery. Stefan has represented IHMC while presenting some of these works at conferences such as the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), and Dynamic Walking.

Stefan joined IHMC in 2021 after earning his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland, where he focused on launch vehicle and spacecraft propulsion systems.