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About

Francesca Palermo is a robotics researcher whose work spans human-machine interfaces, robotic sensing, and remote manipulation, with particular emphasis on applications in healthcare and hazardous environments. She first gained significant recognition through her work on surface electromyography (sEMG)-based prosthetic hand control, with her 2017 study on grasp recognition repeatability accumulating 114 citations — a foundational contribution to improving the robustness of myoelectric prostheses for upper-limb amputees. Her research has since expanded into tactile and proximity sensing, where she has developed innovative methods for autonomous crack detection in remote environments, combining visual and tactile modalities to enable robots to characterize surfaces with high precision. Palermo has also made notable contributions to nuclear decommissioning robotics, co-authoring a widely cited 2021 suite of solutions for safely manipulating radioactive waste — a critical challenge for the nuclear industry. Her more recent work explores virtual reality-based teleoperation, tactile material classification, and container property estimation for human-robot handovers. Across these diverse domains, Palermo consistently bridges sensing, machine learning, and real-world robot deployment, establishing herself as a versatile and impactful figure in applied robotics research.