Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

M. DiCicco is a leading researcher in autonomous robotics, with a focus on perception, planning, and control for mobile manipulators operating in challenging, unstructured environments. Their work bridges the gap between high-level reasoning and low-level actuation, enabling robots to perform complex, whole-body tasks with minimal human intervention. A major contribution is the development of an architecture for online affordance-based perception and whole-body planning, demonstrated during the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials. This work, which has garnered 140 citations, showed how dexterous robots could execute tasks using only sensor data over constrained communications links, a critical step toward field-deployable systems. DiCicco has also advanced autonomous coring for planetary exploration, creating robust estimators and behaviors that allow low-mass rovers to accommodate slip and sensor noise—a key achievement for in-situ resource utilization. With additional contributions in force-torque sensing and visual odometry, DiCicco’s research has shaped how robots perceive and interact with their surroundings, earning recognition for its practical impact on both disaster response and space robotics.