Alessandro De Luca

Alessandro De Luca Professor
Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale Antonio Ruberti - DIAG
Facoltà di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Informatica e Statistica
Sapienza Università di Roma
Via Ariosto 25, 00185 Roma, Italy

email: deluca [at] diag [dot] uniroma1 [dot] it (or a [dot] deluca [at] uniroma1 [dot] it)
room A-210, tel +39 06 77274 052, skype alessandrodeluca

Homepage at my department (also in Italian)
Research profile at Sapienza
Notice Board/Notizie of teaching activities at Sapienza

Google Scholar: my citations; Scopus Author ID#: 7201948195;
Semantic Scholar: 144765522; WoS ResearcherID: F-3835-2011;
ORCID: 0000-0002-0713-5608; Sapienza open access repository: IRIS.
infostud code (for student graduation only): 114788

Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Master of Science in Control Engineering (Director, 2013-19); course web site at DIAG
Office hours for students: see Teaching top menu

Subscribe to our YouTube channel RoboticsLabSapienza. Selected results of my research are in the following playlists:

On my YouTube channel, you can find additional teaching material related to my past courses in the form of videolectures. For the contents, see the web pages of each course (under the Teaching top menu).

Highlights

In the academic year 2024-25, all my lectures take place only in the classroom. For information, please see the web pages of my courses/modules under the Teaching top menu (see also my Sapienza Notice Board).
Keynotes, invited talks, presentations at workshops/schools, and major seminars (since 2015):
- Safe control of physical human-robot interaction. Distinguished speech at the 40th Anniversary of the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA@40). Rotterdam, 25 September 2024.
- On the control of physical human-robot interaction. Keynote at the 1st Doctoral Summer School on Robotics and Intelligent Machines (DRIMS2). SIAF Volterra, 1 September 2023.
- Robots with flexible joints: Modeling and control and Robots with flexible links: Modeling and control. 2023 EECI-IGSC M16 Course on Control of Soft and Articulated Elastic Robots. Sapienza Università di Roma - DIAG, 22-26 May 2023.
- New results on fault and collision detection in robot manipulators. Robotics & Automation Seminars. Università di Pisa - DII, 12 January 2023.
- On the control of physical human-robot interaction. Presentation at the Workshop in honor of Jean-Paul Laumond, Collège de France, Paris, July 11, 2022. Video lecture (about 20 min, starting at 8:24:43).
- Human-robot collaboration in industry and beyond. Workshop on Biovision of the Future: Tech Trends & Sapienza Research, organized by Centro Saperi&Co Sapienza. Roma (virtual), May 9, 2022. Video lecture (in Italian, about 1h, starting at 47:20).
- Control of physical human-robot interaction for safe collaborative tasks. Lecture at the IROS 2021 workshop From Human-Robot Interaction to Collaborative Control: A Human Centered Perspective. Prague (virtual), September 27, 2021. Video of full lecture (about 1h) available on my YouTube channel.
- Regulation, inversion control, and feedback equivalence for flexible robots. Lecture at the Summer School SIDRA 2021 on Modeling and Control of Soft Robots. Bertinoro, July 16, 2021. Video of full lecture (about 1h) available on YouTube.
- Control of soft joint robots for safe physical HRI. Keynote speech at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2019) conference. Freiburg, June 24, 2019. Video of full speech available on the RSS YouTube channel (starting at 2:14:03).
- Advances in control of human-robot collaboration @DIAG. Invited talk at the Robotics Research Jam Sessions - Midsummer 2019. Pisa, June 19, 2019.
- Safe control of physical human-robot interaction. Invited talk at the IIT - Dynamic Interaction Control group. Genova, January 24, 2019. The pdf has links to all videos on YouTube.
- Flexible joint robots: Model-based control revisited. Invited talk at the Scientific Colloquium for the opening of the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at TUM. Munich, October 26, 2018. Video of full talk available.
- Experiences with a control architecture enabling safe human-robot collaboration. IROS 2018 Workshop on Robot Safety: Filling the Gap Between Technology Offer and Industry Needs for a Fully Deployable Human Robot Collaboration. Madrid, October 5, 2018.
- A review on the control of flexible joint manipulators. IROS 2018 Workshop on Soft Robotic Modeling and Control: Bringing Together Articulated Soft Robots and Soft-Bodied Robots. Madrid, October 5, 2018.
- A control architecture for human-robot collaboration. Keynote lecture at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015). Seattle, May 29, 2015. Video of full lecture available. The 30 min lecture was kindly introduced by my colleague and dear friend Seth Hutchinson (President of IEEE RAS 2020-21).
In the academic year 2021-22, my lectures took place again in the classroom (with some restrictions on access, according to the Sapienza procedures for handling the Covid-19 sanitary situation). The lectures were made available online to Sapienza students (as in the previous semesters during the pandemic).
In the second semester of the academic year 2019-20, the lectures of the Robotics 2 course have been video recorded, partly in the classroom and the rest from home due to the Covid-19 emergency. The 37 video lectures are freely available in the Robotics 2 playlist of the Video DIAG - Sapienza YouTube channel (there is also a video summary of the contents). More than 30K independent views as of September 2021. This follows the Robotics 1 playlist, recorded back in 2014-15.
I have been the General Chair of the I-RIM 2019 conference, the 1st Italian Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Machines, organized by the Istituto di Robotica e Macchine Intelligenti (I-RIM), a non-profit organization of national stakeholders in robotics and intelligent machines. The conference was part of the Three Day (3D) event held in Roma, October 18-20, 2019, at the Fiera di Roma, Pavillions 9 and 10 (in collaboration with Maker Faire - The European Edition 2019). The current sixth edition I-RIM 2024 will take place at the Gazometro in Rone, October 25-27, 2024.
At ICRA 2019 in Montreal, I have received the 2019 IEEE-RAS George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation, with the following citation: "For contributions to the robotics and automation community through research innovation and education, and for leadership in publication and conference activities in RAS".
At the end of 2017, I became a Senior Research Fellow of the Sapienza School of Advanced Studies (SSAS) in the academic class of Science and Technology (for three academic years, 2017-20; renewed for three more years, 2020-23). Together with my colleague Luca Scuccimarra, we have coordinated the 2018-19 interdisciplinary course of the School: Homo Faber: Past, Present and Future. 15 lectures have been delivered by national and international experts, focusing on complementary aspects of the social and ethical impact of automation and digital tranformation on our lives, on the relation between humankind, machines and work, on how human knowledge is represented and has been transmitted from the past to the future, and on the boundaries between mind, perception and the physical world. Videos of all lectures, lecture slides, and additional materials are available on the moodle e-learning platform of Sapienza.
On January 9, 2018, a surprise workshop was organized at DIAG for my (past) 60th birthday. See the program leaflet, the poster, and the nice memories at ADL Festschrift. Thanks a lot to the dear organizers, and to all my close colleagues and friends who came from everywhere!
I have been the Program Chair of ICRA 2016, together with my colleague Antonio Bicchi. This flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) was succesfully held in Stockholm, May 16-21, 2016. For the first time, we handled also the evaluation for possible presentation at the conference of papers submitted to the new IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
During the first semester of the academic year 2014-15, the lectures of my Robotics 1 course have been video recorded, as a first experiment at the department level. The 30 video lectures are available in the Robotics 1 playlist of the Video DIAG - Sapienza YouTube channel (there is also a 3 min summary of contents). Please note that these are traditional lectures with the use of multimedia material, but not prepared on purpose for online offering (differently from MOOC courses). More than 120K independent views as of September 2023.

Coordinator of the European IP project
SAPHARI (FP7-ICT-2011-7, #287513)
Safe and Autonomous Physical Human-Aware Robot Interaction (2011-2015)

SAPHARI is over, but our research journey through safe pHRI goes on!
Look here for a summary of the project results

A 15-minute presentation of the project
at CogSys 2012, Vienna (February 23, 2012)

Last update: October 4, 2024