antonio paolillo   

Antonio Paolillo

Senior Researcher

Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA) USI-SUPSI
Lugano, Switzerland

antonio [dot] paolillo [at] idsia.ch / supsi.ch

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I am a Senior Researcher at Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), USI-SUPSI, in Lugano (Switzerland) and responsible for the activities in rehabilitation robotics and social human-robot interaction of the "Autonomous Robotics" research area at IDSIA.

I have been a Researcher at IDSIA from May 2020 to September 2024. Before joining IDSIA, I was a post-doc at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (from October 2019 to April 2020); Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland (January 2018 - August 2019); CNRS-University of Montpellier, France (April 2015 - December 2017). From April to November 2015, I was a visiting researcher at the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory of Tsukuba, Japan. In June 2015, I participated in the DARPA Robotics Challenge as a member of the AIST-NEDO team. In March 2015, I received my Ph.D. in System Engineering from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and, in January 2011, my Master's degree in Electronic Engineering from the same University. From January to July 2014, I was a visiting scholar at CNRS-University of Montpellier, France, and from May to December 2010, a visiting student at Örebro University, Sweden.

From 2023, I am an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). I have been an Associate Editor for the International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR) in 2024 and 2025, and for the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) from 2021 to 2023. I am a work package leader of the European project SERMAS and involved in other Swiss projects. I have been the Chair of the 17th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR 2024).

My research aims at reducing the gap between people and robots. Given the level of ubiquity reached by today's robots, more and more non-technician users ask for easy-to-use, interactive, and adapting machines. To favor the democratization of robots, I deploy tools from the areas of robotic control, machine learning, and AI in general. My research interests include human-robot interaction, robotic perception, humanoid and mobile robotics, robotic manipulation, sensor-based control, and visual servoing.

News

Jan. 26 The paper "User-Tailored Learning to Forecast Walking Modes for Exosuits" by G. Abbate, E. Tricomi, N. Gierden, A. Giusti, L. Masia, A. Paolillo, has been accepted to ICRA 2026 (check out my publications page).
Dec. 25 The paper "A Wizard for Kids: A Platform for Improvised Child–Robot Interactions" by D. Frova, M. Landoni, S. Arreghini, and A. Paolillo has been accepted to HRI 2026 (check out my publications page).
Oct. 25 Video interview featured on "Il Faro", a news segment by RSI (Swiss public television, in Italian).
Jul. 25 Interviews on several media for our social robotics experiments: Radio program “Zero 91” broadcast by RadioTicino (go at minute 01:29:00); SUPSI’s institutional communication; USI’s institutional communication; ; TicinoNews; RSI radio interview; RSI TV interview, il Quotidiano; laRegione; Finews.ch; VivereLugano; Luganobiz; ValtellinaNews.
Mar. 25 The paper "Imitation learning-based Direct Visual Servoing using the large projection formulation" by S. Auddy, A. Paolillo, J. Piater and M. Saveriano, has been published in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (check out it here and on my publications page).
Feb. 25 The Proceedings of HFR 2024 are now available online.
Jan. 25 The paper "A Map-free Deep Learning-based Framework for Gate-to-Gate Monocular Visual Navigation aboard Miniaturized Aerial Vehicles" by L. Scarciglia, A. Paolillo and D. Palossi, has just been accepted to ICRA25 (check out my publications page).
Oct. 24 Elevation to the grade of IEEE Senior member.
Jun. 24 Italian National Scientific qualification as associate professor in the Italian higher education system for the disciplinary field of 09/G1 - System and control engineering, 09/H1 - Information processing systems, and 01/B1 - Informatics.
Jun. 24 The paper "A Service Robot in the Wild: Analysis of Users Intentions, Robot Behaviors, and Their Impact on the Interaction" by S. Arreghini, G. Abbate, A. Giusti, and myself has been accepted to IROS24 (check out my publications page).
May 24 We now accept submission for HFR 2024, see the call for papers!
Mar. 24 The paper "A Long-Range Mutual Gaze Detector for HRI" by S. Arreghini, G. Abbate, A. Giusti, has just been presented at HRI24 (check out my publications page).
Jan. 24 The paper "Predicting the Intention to Interact with a Service Robot: the Role of Gaze Cues" by S. Arreghini, G. Abbate, A. Giusti, and myself has been accepted to ICRA24 (check out my publications page).
Jan. 24 Read my interview on Ticino Scienza, an online newspaper created by the IBSA Foundation, about our activity on social human-robot interaction (the article is written in Italian).

Recent publications

For a full list of my publications, please go here.
  • G. Abbate, E. Tricomi, N. Gierden, A. Giusti, L. Masia, A. Paolillo, "User-Tailored Learning to Forecast Walking Modes for Exosuits," IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2026.
  • D. Frova, M. Landoni, S. Arreghini, A. Paolillo, "A Wizard for Kids: A Platform for Improvised Child–Robot Interactions", ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2026.
  • S. Auddy, A. Paolillo, J. Piater, M. Saveriano, "Imitation Learning-based Direct Visual Servoing using the Large Projection Formulation," Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2025.
  • L. Scarciglia, A. Paolillo, D. Palossi, "A Map-free Deep Learning-based Framework for Gate-to-Gate Monocular Visual Navigation aboard Miniaturized Aerial Vehicles," IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2025