Papers
7
Total Citations
772
H-Index
6
About
Xavi Gratal is a roboticist whose research sits at the intersection of perception, manipulation, and autonomous decision-making. His most influential work, the survey “Dual arm manipulation—A review,” has garnered over 540 citations, establishing a foundational reference for researchers tackling bimanual coordination. Gratal’s core contributions address the challenge of robotic grasping under uncertainty, particularly when visual information is incomplete. In his highly cited 2011 paper, “Mind the gap,” he pioneered methods for predicting the shape of unknown objects to enable reliable grasping from a tabletop, effectively bridging the gap between partial observation and successful manipulation. He further extended this work into multimodal perception, exploring how robots can identify the contents of containers—such as milk or juice—by combining vision and touch, a critical skill for household robotics. Gratal also advanced real-time robot control through virtual visual servoing techniques, enabling accurate pose estimation for both hand-eye coordination and full humanoid body tracking. His research consistently emphasizes the tight coupling between perception and action, making his work essential reading for students and engineers developing autonomous systems that must interact with unstructured, real-world environments.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Dual arm manipulation—A survey546 citations · 2012
- 2Mind the gap - robotic grasping under incomplete observation109 citations · 2011
- 3What's in the container? Classifying object contents from vision and touch52 citations · 2014
- 4Visual servoing on unknown objects28 citations · 2011
- 5Virtual Visual Servoing for Real-Time Robot Pose Estimation18 citations · 2011
- 6Scene Representation and Object Grasping Using Active Vision15 citations · 2010
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