Senior Research Associate

Dr. Luigi Penco is a roboticist at IHMC and focuses on autonomy, user interfaces and teleoperation of humanoid robots. He has been working as a lead developer of autonomous behaviors and human-machine interfaces in a number of projects focused on advancing humanoid robots. These include projects supported by the Office of Naval Research, Army Research Lab, and NASA.

He has also made significant contributions to IEEE Robotics and Automation Society by serving as an associate editor for prestigious conferences including IROS 2024 and Humanoids 2024, while also playing vital organizational roles in major events such as ICRA 2022 workshops and the Humanoids 2024 conference.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from Roma Tre University in 2015 and a master’s in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from La Sapienza University of Rome in 2018. In 2022 he received a PhD in Computer Science from Université de Lorraine, while conducting his doctoral studies at Inria Nancy Grand-Est.

During his doctoral research at Inria, he has contributed to the EU H2020 AnDy project on human-robot collaboration. He has developed a teleoperation system for the humanoid robot iCub with the goal of providing an intuitive way to realize complex tasks and to convey collaborative policies to the robot.

He likes avatar technologies, urban style, and more generally being involved in things that look futuristic.