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About

Marco Maggiali is a prominent robotics researcher whose work has profoundly shaped the field of artificial tactile sensing and humanoid robot design. Based at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), he has dedicated his career to bridging the gap between human sensory capabilities and robotic systems, with a particular focus on electronic skin, capacitive touch sensors, and humanoid platform development. Maggiali's most influential contributions center on large-scale robot tactile sensing, culminating in the development of compliant "skin" systems that endow humanoid robots with distributed pressure sensing across their entire bodies. His 2011 paper on tactile sensor implementation has garnered over 400 citations, while his foundational 2008 work on embedded artificial skin has exceeded 250. Together, these contributions established critical frameworks still referenced in soft robotics and haptic technology research today. Beyond tactile sensing, Maggiali contributed significantly to the iCub humanoid platform — an open-source robot widely adopted in embodied cognition research — and pioneered bioinspired robotic eye designs for naturalistic visual tracking. His more recent work on stretchable graphene-based electronic skin and the iCub3 avatar system demonstrates a continued drive toward next-generation human-robot interaction. With nearly 1,500 cumulative citations, his research remains a cornerstone reference for engineers and scientists advancing robotic perception.