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About

Lorenzo Cominelli is a prominent researcher at the intersection of social robotics, human-robot interaction, and artificial intelligence, whose work has fundamentally advanced our understanding of how robots can meaningfully engage with humans in social and emotional contexts. Cominelli's most celebrated contribution lies in developing cognitively inspired architectures for social robots. His SEAI framework, grounded in Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, introduced a biologically motivated approach to machine emotion and decision-making, earning 57 citations and establishing a theoretical foundation that threads through much of his subsequent work. This thinking was further refined in "Designing the Mind of a Social Robot" (40 citations) and his earlier I-CLIPS cognitive system, demonstrating a sustained commitment to building robots with genuinely human-like reasoning capacities. His 2021 study on promises and trust in human-robot interaction (84 citations, his most-cited work) tackles one of the field's most pressing questions: how humans extend trust to social machines. His humanoid platform Abel has served as a testbed for integrating body, emotion, and time perception into cohesive social agents. Through educational initiatives like the EASEL Project, Cominelli has also translated theoretical advances into real-world applications. Collectively, his work has accumulated over 330 citations, marking him as a significant voice shaping the future of socially intelligent robotics.