Gennaro Raiola
Italian Institute of Technology, Centre Inria de l'université de Bordeaux, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives, Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation
Papers
15
Total Citations
333
H-Index
9
About
Gennaro Raiola is a robotics researcher whose work spans human-robot interaction, collaborative manipulation, legged locomotion, and robot learning. He has made particularly significant contributions to the design of safe and intuitive systems that enable humans and robots to work side by side effectively. Raiola's most impactful contribution is his 2018 development of a safety- and energy-aware impedance controller for collaborative robots, which has garnered 98 citations and addresses the critical challenge of ensuring human safety in shared workspaces. Complementing this, his series of works on virtual guiding fixtures and probabilistic virtual guides — accumulating over 90 citations collectively — transformed how robots are programmed for co-manipulation tasks, reducing the burden on human operators through intuitive, learnable constraint frameworks. Beyond collaboration, Raiola has advanced legged robotics through his concept of the "Feasible Region," an actuation-aware extension of classical stability criteria, and a practical whole-body locomotion framework for quadruped robots. His earlier research into skill learning and parameterized demonstrations reflects a sustained interest in enabling robots to generalize across tasks. Additional work exploring robot-assisted autism therapy and person-following navigation underscores his commitment to socially impactful, human-centered robotics.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Co-manipulation with multiple probabilistic virtual guides38 citations · 2015
- 3Feasible Region: An Actuation-Aware Extension of the Support Region37 citations · 2020
- 4Co-manipulation with a library of virtual guiding fixtures33 citations · 2017
- 5
- 6Iterative virtual guides programming for human-robot comanipulation22 citations · 2017
- 7A Simple Yet Effective Whole-Body Locomotion Framework for Quadruped Robots19 citations · 2020
- 8Simultaneous on-line Discovery and Improvement of Robotic Skill options14 citations · 2014
- 9Learning compact parameterized skills with a single regression13 citations · 2013
- 10