I am Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Director of the CRISP group at the School of Engineering and Materials Science (SEMS) of the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
I am also associated to the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).
The CRISP group is part of ARQ (Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary).
Since October 2018, I am also Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.

My main research interest is in Cognitive Robotics: building intelligent robots by taking inspiration from humans, and validating theories of human cognition by testing computational models on robots. Within this general approach, my research focuses on "The Intelligence of the Hand", in robots and humans. This includes: visuo-haptic perception and exploration of objects, grasping, dexterous manipulation, affordance perception, tool use, body schema, eye-hand coordination, physical interaction and collaboration, non-verbal communication, the sense of touch.

I also collaborate with VisLab, at the Instituto de Sistemas e Robotica of the Instituto Superior Tecnico (Lisbon, Portugal), as visiting associate researcher in humanoid and cognitive robotics, and with SuganoLab, at the Department of Modern Mechanical Engineering of Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan), as visiting professor in tactile sensing for robotic manipulation.

Before I was with the Biped Group of Takanishi Lab (Waseda University), and with the RBCS (Robotics Brain and Cognitive Science) Department of the IIT (Italian Institute of Technology).

News! - 16/10/2019

We are organizing a workshop on "Deep Probabilistic Generative Models for Cognitive Architecture in Robotics" at IROS 2019 in Macau (China). See you there!

News! - 24/01/2017

We are organizing a workshop on tactile sensing at ICRA 2017: "The robotic sense of touch: from sensing to understanding". Be there! ...or be square! (or be both?)

News! - 20/09/2016

The second edition of our workshop on Body Representations in Humans and Robots was a great success at the ICDL-Epirob 2016 conference in Cergy-Pontoise! Many thanks to all the speakers and attendees ;)

News! - 17/06/2015

I am organizing a workshop named "Learning Object Affordances: a fundamental step to allow prediction, planning and tool use?", together with Dr. E. Ugur, Prof. A. Cangelosi and Prof. J. Santos-Victor.
It will be held in Hamburg (Germany) on September the 28th, 2015, as part of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2015).
A call is open for contributions (deadline on July 31, 2015): check it out here!

News! - 15/06/2015

I am co-organizing a workshop named "Bottom-up and top-down development of robot skills", that will be held in Istanbul (Turkey) on July the 31st, 2015, as part of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR 2015).
I will give a talk about "Learning affordances for tool use and planning". Check out the program here!

News! - 31/05/2015

Our workshop "Get in touch! Tactile & force sensing for autonomous, compliant, intelligent robots" at ICRA 2015 has been a great success :)
Check the details here!

News! - 29/08/2014

I am co-organizing a workshop named "Development of body representations in humans and robots", that will be held in Genoa (Italy) on October the 13th, 2014, as part of the IEEE International Joint Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL/Epirob 2014).
A call is open for contributions (deadline on September the 7th): check it out here!

News! - 24/08/2013

I am organizing a workshop named "Towards social humanoid robots: what makes interaction human-like?", that will be held in Tokyo (Japan) on November the 3rd, 2013, as part of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2013).
A call is open for contributions: check it out here!