ABSTRACT: Operating in a dynamic and unstructured environment is one of the main challenges of today’s robotics. Robots have  to physically interact with entities with unknown dynamics, among which the human is the most challenging. In this scenario, the interactive behavior of the robot has to be reliable, dynamic and safe. In this talk, I will show how, using energy based arguments, it is possible to build a flexible yet provably reliable and safe control strategy for human robot interaction

SHORT BIO: Cristian Secchi is a Full Professor of Robotics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He received his M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Bologna in 2000 and his Ph.D in Information Engineering from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2004. In 2006 his thesis on interactive robotic interfaces has been selected as one of the three finalists for the Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best PhD thesis on robotics in Europe. 

He has served as an Associate Editor of the Robotics and Automation Magazine (2005-2008), for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2012-2017) and for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2015-2017) and for the International Journal or Robotics (2023-). He served in the editorial boards of the major robotics conferences, and he is the program chair of the 2024 European Robotics Forum, the most influential meeting of the robotics community in Europe.

He coordinated and participated to several national and European projects and to several research activities funded by industries. The research project CROW (Coordination of AGVs in Automatic Warehouses) project has been selected as a finalist for the 2010 EUROP/EURON Technology Transfer Award for the best Technology transfer project in Europe. He is currently PI of SIMOD, where a novel multi-robot manipulation strategy for deformable objects will be developed.

He is the Director of the ARSControl lab, the Automation, Robotics and Systems Control laboratory of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His main research interests are in the fields of human-robot collaboration, multi-robot systems and medical robotics. In particular he is interested in energy based methods for achieving a smooth safe and stable interaction between humans and robots in different application areas. He is author of more than 300 scientific articles published on conference proceedings and on international journals, including three books and three patents.