Papers
32
Total Citations
524
H-Index
12
About
Paolo Salaris is a robotics researcher whose work spans optimal control, variable stiffness actuation, visual servoing, and active sensing — areas at the intersection of robot mechanics, perception, and motion planning. His most highly cited contribution, "Optimality Principles in Variable Stiffness Control: The VSA Hammer" (2011, 110 citations), established foundational principles for exploiting Variable Stiffness Actuators (VSAs) to enhance both robot safety and dynamic performance, demonstrating that tunable mechanical compliance can be leveraged optimally for explosive tasks. This thread continued with studies on VSA-based kicking and energy-efficient cyclic motion, collectively shaping how soft actuation is understood and deployed in modern robotics. Salaris has also made significant contributions to vision-constrained motion planning, characterizing shortest paths for nonholonomic robots subject to field-of-view limitations, and developing visual servoing strategies for autonomous navigation in complex environments. His active sensing work addresses trajectory planning that maximizes information gathered by onboard sensors, with practical extensions to shared human-robot control. Perhaps most distinctively, Salaris has bridged robotics and the performing arts, applying Laban notation systems to formalize and generate expressive humanoid robot motion — a creative interdisciplinary direction that has attracted notable scholarly interest. His cumulative body of work reflects both rigorous mathematical depth and imaginative breadth across robotics research.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Optimality principles in variable stiffness control: The VSA hammer110 citations · 2011
- 2Shortest Paths for a Robot With Nonholonomic and Field-of-View Constraints81 citations · 2010
- 3Optimality principles in stiffness control: The VSA kick37 citations · 2012
- 4
- 5Optimal Active Sensing with Process and Measurement Noise22 citations · 2018
- 6
- 7Visual Servoing in the Large21 citations · 2009
- 8Online optimal active sensing control19 citations · 2017
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