Nuno Ferreira Duarte

About

Nuno Ferreira Duarte is a robotics and human-robot interaction researcher whose work sits at the intersection of robot perception, grasping, and nonverbal communication. His research focuses on enabling robots to understand and respond to human actions more naturally and safely, with particular emphasis on object handovers, physical property estimation, and gaze-based communication. Among his most influential contributions is his benchmark for human-to-robot handovers of unseen containers (41 citations), which addresses the critical challenge of estimating 3D pose and physical properties of unknown objects in real time — a foundational problem for safe robotic manipulation. His 3DSGrasp framework (23 citations) tackles incomplete point cloud data through 3D shape-completion, significantly advancing robust real-world robotic grasping. Duarte has also made notable strides in understanding nonverbal cues, demonstrating how gaze dynamics and body movement encode action intentions in both human-human and human-robot interaction, with works on the Gaze Dialogue Model and action alignment from gaze cues accumulating strong scholarly interest. Across his portfolio, Duarte bridges cognitive science and engineering, revealing how physical object properties shape implicit communication and robot controller design. His work collectively informs more intuitive, socially aware robotic systems — a growing priority as robots enter collaborative human environments.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Benchmark for Human-to-Robot Handovers of Unseen Containers With Unknown Filling

   41 citations · 2020
2. 2
   3DSGrasp: 3D Shape-Completion for Robotic Grasp

   23 citations · 2023
3. 3
   Action Alignment from Gaze Cues in Human-Human and Human-Robot Interaction

   18 citations · 2019
4. 4
   The Gaze Dialogue Model: Nonverbal Communication in HHI and HRI

   16 citations · 2022
5. 5
   From human action understanding to robot action execution: how the physical properties of handled objects modulate non-verbal cues

   13 citations · 2020
6. 6
   Expressing and Inferring Action Carefulness in Human-to-Robot Handovers

   9 citations · 2023
7. 7
   The Role of Object Physical Properties in Human Handover Actions: Applications in Robotics

   8 citations · 2022
8. 8
   A dataset of head and eye gaze during dyadic interaction task for modeling robot gaze behavior

   5 citations · 2018
9. 9
   If You Are Careful, So Am I! How Robot Communicative Motions Can Influence Human Approach in a Joint Task

   5 citations · 2022
10. 10
    GeeBot

    4 citations · 2018

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links