My name is Paolo Franceschi. I am currently a reseracher at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), in the Automation Robotics and Machines Laboratory (ARM lab), under the supervision of Prof. Anna Valente.
I received a B.Sc. in aerospace engineering and an M.Sc. in mechanical engineering from Politecnico of Milano in 2015 and 2017, respectively.
During my studies, I had the opportunity to work on my master thesis project at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Josè, California. There I spent about six months developing a bipedal platform. My main activities were modeling the bipedal robot and implementing control strategies to allow robust walking.
From January 2018 to September 2023, I have been a research fellow at the Institute of Intelligent Industrial Technologies and Systems for Advanced Manufacturing (STIIMA-CNR), under the supervision of Dr. Nicola Pedrocchi and Dr. Loris Roveda. My main research focuses are interaction control and workspace optimization for manipulating and assembling large objects.
I was involved in the H2020 EURECA project (2028-2020), aiming to automatize the assembly of the airplane’s interior. I was also involved in the H2020 DrapeBot project (2021-2024), where I developed controllers for the shared transport of carbon fiber plies.
From November 2020 to November 2023, I have also been a Ph.D. student at the department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Brescia (UniBs), in the Automatic Control for Intelligent Robots (CARI) lab under the supervision of Prof. Manuel Beschi. There, I worked on developing control for physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). The main topic addressed were modeling human behavior, modeling ionteraction with a Game-Theoretic framework, and the dynamic leader-follower role arbitration between human and robot.

Since October 2023 I am a researcher at SUPSI in Lugano. I am currently involved in the Horizon Europe Fluently project, where I study learning methods for teaching robots new tasks.