Papers
50
Total Citations
2,485
H-Index
25
About
Roberto Calandra is a prominent robotics and machine learning researcher whose work sits at the intersection of tactile sensing, robot manipulation, locomotion, and probabilistic learning methods. He has made transformative contributions to the field of robotic touch, pioneering the use of vision-based tactile feedback to enable robots to grasp, regrasp, and manipulate objects with human-like dexterity. His 2018 paper "More Than a Feeling" (353 citations) demonstrated that integrating tactile and visual inputs dramatically improves robotic grasping, while his development of TACTO (131 citations), an open-source tactile sensor simulator, has lowered barriers for the broader research community to explore touch-based robotics. Beyond manipulation, Calandra has advanced Bayesian optimization for robot locomotion, showing how data-efficient probabilistic methods can optimize bipedal and quadrupedal gaits under real-world uncertainty, with multiple papers accumulating hundreds of citations. His work on Manifold Gaussian Processes (214 citations) further demonstrates his depth in probabilistic modeling. From teaching robots to play table tennis to enabling aerial vehicles to adapt to suspended payloads, Calandra's research consistently bridges rigorous theory with real-world robotic challenges, earning him recognition as a leading voice in embodied machine learning.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1More Than a Feeling: Learning to Grasp and Regrasp Using Vision and Touch353 citations · 2018
- 2Bayesian optimization for learning gaits under uncertainty290 citations · 2015
- 3Manifold Gaussian Processes for regression214 citations · 2016
- 4
- 5Manipulation by Feel: Touch-Based Control with Deep Predictive Models121 citations · 2019
- 6The Feeling of Success: Does Touch Sensing Help Predict Grasp Outcomes?110 citations · 2017
- 7Active tactile object exploration with Gaussian processes96 citations · 2016
- 8Model-Based Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Flight With Suspended Payloads94 citations · 2021
- 9Learning to Play Table Tennis From Scratch Using Muscular Robots86 citations · 2022
- 10An experimental comparison of Bayesian optimization for bipedal locomotion80 citations · 2014