Andrea Del Prete (original) (raw)

Biography

Since 2022 I have been an associate professor in the Industrial Engineering Department of the University of Trento (Italy), where I am part of the Interdepartmental Robotics Lab (IDRA). From 2019 to 2021 I had been a tenure-track assistant professor (RTD-B) in the same department, where I teach optimal control and reinforcement learning for robotics, and computer programming in C++.

In 2018 I had been a research scientist in the Movement Generation and Control group at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen, Germany), under the lead of Ludovic Righetti.

From 2014 to 2017 I had been an associated researcher in the Gepetto team (LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse), where I have been working with the humanoid robot HRP-2. My main collaborations were with Nicolas Mansard, Olivier Stasse, Steve Tonneau and Justin Carpentier.

Before going to LAAS I had spent four years (3 of PhD + 1 of post-doc) at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT, Genova, Italy), where I had been working with Lorenzo Natale and Francesco Nori on the iCub humanoid robot.

I am currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (since 2020) and for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (since 2024).

Interests

Education

Experience

PhD

January 2010 – December 2012 Genova, Italy

Motion and force control of the iCub humanoid robot, using force and tactile sensors.

Post-Doc

January 2013 – December 2013 Genova, Italy

Multi-contact force control for the iCub humanoid robot, in the framework of the CoDyCo EU project.

Post-Doc / Associated Researcher

January 2014 – December 2017 Toulouse, France

Control of the humanoid robot HRP-2 using robust optimization, stochastic optimization, motor identification, torque control, hierarchical trajectory optimization.

Research Scientist

January 2018 – December 2018 Tuebingen, Germany

Optimization-based control for the humanoid robot Athena.

Assistant Professor (tenure track)

January 2019 – December 2021 Trento, Italy

Research on robot co-design, robust and stochastic model predictive control. Teaching computer programming and optimization-based robot control.

Associate Professor

January 2022 – Present Trento, Italy

Carrying out research on merging learning and model-based techniques to achieve safe robot control. Teaching courses on robotics and programming for bachelor and master students.

Courses

A 48-hour course for master students focusing on modern optimal control and reinforcement learning techniques for robot control

Optimization and Learning for Robot Control

A 12-hour course for PhD students about reactive control (TSID) and trajectory optimization for legged robots.

Optimization-based Control of Legged Robots

A 3-hour course for PhD students about Quadratic-Progamming-based dynamic control.

Task-Space Inverse Dynamics

PhD Students

Recent Publications

Contact