Manuel Lopes
University of Plymouth, École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées, Instituto Superior Técnico, INESC TEC, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Microsistemas e Nanotecnologias, Centre Inria de l'université de Bordeaux, University of Lisbon, Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa
Papers
46
Total Citations
2,997
H-Index
26
About
Manuel Lopes is a leading researcher at the intersection of robotics, cognitive development, and human-robot interaction. His work centers on how robots can learn autonomously through intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and interaction with their environment—a key contribution to developmental robotics. Lopes is best known for his foundational role in the iCub humanoid robot project, an open-source platform designed to study human cognition (606 citations). He has made seminal contributions to the theory and application of affordances, showing how robots can learn the relationships between actions, objects, and effects to enable prediction, planning, and imitation (354 and 112 citations). His research on intrinsic motivation and curiosity has shaped modern approaches to open-ended learning in artificial agents (377 citations). Lopes has also advanced multimodal attention systems, sound localization for humanoids, and ergonomic human-robot collaboration. With over 2,000 citations across his most influential works, his research has had a lasting impact on how robots develop cognitive skills through self-exploration and social guidance, bridging machine learning, developmental psychology, and robotics.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and learning377 citations · 2016
- 3Learning Object Affordances: From Sensory--Motor Coordination to Imitation354 citations · 2008
- 4Design of the robot-cub (iCub) head182 citations · 2006
- 5
- 6
- 7Affordance-based imitation learning in robots112 citations · 2007
- 8Postural optimization for an ergonomic human-robot interaction80 citations · 2017
- 9Learning grasping affordances from local visual descriptors77 citations · 2009
- 10Active Learning for Teaching a Robot Grounded Relational Symbols68 citations · 2013