Nikos Tsagarakis is a Senior Scientist at IIT with overall responsibility for Humanoid design & Human Centred Mechatronics development. Before joining IIT he was a research Fellow and then Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Robotics and Automation at the University of Salford where he worked on haptic systems, wearable exoskeletons, rehabilitation robots and humanoids robots. He is an author or co-author of over 170 papers in research journals and at international conferences, has 7 patents and has received the 2009 PE Publishing Award from the Journal of Systems and Control Engineering and prizes for Best Paper at ICAR (2003). He was also a finalist for Best Entertainment Robots and Systems - 20th Anniversary Award at IROS 2007 and finalist for the Best Manipulation paper at ICRA 2012 and Best Paper at Humanoids 2012.

Giorgio Metta is Senior Researcher at IIT and director of the iCub Facility. He is also Deputy Director at IIT, delegate to the international relations of the institute. Giorgio Metta is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Plymouth. He was one of the coordinators of the FP6 IST 004370 RobotCub project which will be providing a portfolio of robotic technologies to iCub2Work. Giorgio Metta has been active in the field of Cognitive Robotics for the past 15 years resulting in about 200 peer-reviewed publications. His main interests are at the intersection of robotics and neuroscience, in particular, with regards to the development of sensorimotor coordination. He has been principal investigator in a dozen of EU projects.

Lorenzo Natale received his degree in Electronic Engineering (with honors) in 2000 and Ph.D. in Robotics in 2004 from the University of Genoa. He was later postdoctoral researcher at the MIT CSAIL. Presently he is Team Leader at the IIT. In the past ten years Lorenzo Natale worked on various humanoid platforms. His research interests range from sensorimotor learning and perception to software architectures for robotics. He has participated to several EU-funded projects (MIRROR, CogVis, ADAPT, RobotCub, RoboSKIN and CHRIS).

Darwin G. Caldwell is the Director of Advanced Robotics at IIT, and a Visiting/Honorary Professor at the Universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Kings College, Bangor and Tianjin China. His research interests include innovative actuators, force augmentation exoskeletons, dextrous manipulators, humanoid (iCub, COMAN) and quadrupled robots (HyQ), and rehabilitation robotics. He is the author or co-author of over 300 academic papers, 15 patents and has received awards from several international conference and journals including, 2009 PE Publishing Award, 2011 Emerald publishing award, IEEE ICRA, IEEE/RSJ IROS, IEEE ICIA, MMVR, IEEE Humanoids, IEEE CASE; ACHI, ICAR, IFAC IAV and Virtual Concepts. He is on the editorial board of the Int. J. Social Robotics and Ind. Robot and Tech. Editor of the Trans. in Mechatronics. 

Prof. Auke Ijspeert (MSc, PhD) is the director of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BIOROB) in the School of Engineering and is also affiliated to the University of Southern California. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He uses numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of the functioning of animals, and inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles (some of them in high impact journals such as Science), and is regularly invited to give presentations on these topics. His H-index is 37 (Harzing’s Publish or Perish), 23 (Scopus) and 17 (ISI, Web of Knowledge). With his colleagues, he has received the Best Paper Award at ICRA2002, the Industrial Robot Highly Commended Award at CLAWAR2005, and Best paper award at Humanoids 2007. He was the Technical Program Chair of 5 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, EPFL-LATSIS2006), and has been a program committee member of over 40 conferences. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and has acted as guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Autonomous Robots, and Biological Cybernetics. 

Antonio Bicchi is Professor of Robotics at the University of Pisa. He graduated from the University of Bologna in 1988 and was a postdoc scholar at M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence lab in 1988–1990.  He teaches  Control Systems and Robotics in the Department of Information Engineering  (DIE) of the University of Pisa,  leads the Robotics  group at the  Research Center "E. Piaggio'' of the University of Pisa since 1990, and served as Director from 2003 to 2012. He collaborates as a Senior Scientist with the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. His main research interests are in Robotics, Haptics, and Control Systems. He has published more than 300 papers on international journals, books, and refereed conferences (h=38 on Google Scholar). He currently serves as the President of the Italian Association or Researchers in Automatic Control. He has served as Editor in Chief of the Conference Editorial Board for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), as Vice President and as Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE RAS.  He is Editor-in-Chief for the series "Springer Briefs on Control, Automation and Robotics", and is (or has been) in the editorial board of several scientific journals, including the top-ranked Int.l J. Robotics Research, the IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Trans. Automation Science and Engineering, and IEEE RAS Magazine. He has organized and co-chaired the first WorldHaptics Conference (2005), and Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (2007). He is the recipient of several awards and honors. In 2012, he was awarded with an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for his research on human and robot hands.

Marco Gabiccini received the Laurea degree (cum laude) and the Ph.D. both from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 2000 and 2006, respectively. During his Ph.D. he was a visiting scholar at the GearLab, The Ohio State University, Columbus, from 2003 to 2004. Since 2001, he has been doing research at the Department of Mechanical, Nuclear and Production Engineering, University of Pisa. In 2006, he also joined the Research Center Centro “E. Piaggio”. He is currently a faculty member of the Department of Mechanical, Nuclear and Production Engineering (DIMNP), and a Principal Investigator in the EU project PACMAN for Centro Piaggio. He teaches Robotics, Applied Mechanics and Biomechanics at the University of Pisa, School of Engineering. His main research interests are in the field of theory of gearing, geometrical methods in robotics and in the areas of dynamics, kinematics and control of complex mechanical systems.

Lucia Pallottino is Assistant Professor in Robotics and Automation at the University of Pisa in the Department of Information Engineering  (DIE). She received the Laurea degree in Mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Robotics and Industrial Automation from the University of Pisa, Italy in 1997 and 2002 respectively. She is currently developing her research at the Research Center “E. Piaggio”. Her main research interests within Robotics are in motion planning and control for nonholonomic vehicles, optimal control of constrained systems, distributed control of multi-robot vehicles and quantised control. She has published about 50 refereed papers (h=12 on Google Scholar). 

An important addition to the Pisa Touch Lab will be the collaboration of Prof. Emilio Frazzoli from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  a leading expert in motion planning and control, and one of the originators of many of the ideas (such as symbolic control and the RRT* algorithm)  that form an important part of this proposal (for a CV, see description of the MIT partner). Prof. Frazzoli has already spent extended visiting periods in Pisa, doing joint research work and substantially contributing to the preparation of this proposal. He will be appointed Adjunct Professor by our Department and will regularly consult for Centro “E. Piaggio” in the four years of the project, spending at least 1 PM per year in Pisa dedicated to this project. In addition, Prof. Frazzoli plans to spend 3 PM in Pisa during his forthcoming sabbatical, in the academic year 2013-2014. Emilio Frazzoli’s pioneering expertise on dynamic motion planning and control will play a key role in several aspects of specific studies of the WALK-MAN project, in particular for the studies associated with WP6, which he will co-lead.

Tamim Asfour is full professor at the Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is chair of Humanoid Robotics Systems and head of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T). His major current research interest is high performance 24/7 humanoid robotics. He received his diploma degree in Electrical Engineering and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in 1994 and 2003 respectively. He has been active in the field of Humanoid Robotics for the last 12 years resulting in about 150 peer-reviewed publications with research focus on engineering humanoid robot systems, grasping, imitation learning aand control architectures.  He is the developer of the ARMAR humanoid robot family (ARMAR-I, …, ARMAR-4). Tamim Asfour has acted as co-coordinator, scientific coordinator and principal scientist of successful EU (PACO-PLUS, GRASP, Xperience) and National projects (SFB 588, Autonomous Learning). He is European Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Humanoid Robots and member the Executive Board of the German Association of Robotics (DGR). He serves on the organizing and program committees of  several  international conferences on robotics, including Humanoids, ICRA, IROS, RSS, RO-MAN and CogSys.

Nikolaus Vahrenkampis postdoctoral researcher at KIT. Heceived his Diploma and Ph.D. from KIT, in 2005 and 2011, respectively. From 2011 to 2012, he was post-doc at the Cognitive Humanoids Lab of the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), where he worked on grasp and motion planning for the humanoid robot iCub. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Anthropomatics at KIT and works on software development, grasping and mobile manipulation for the humanoid robots of the ARMAR family. His research interests include humanoid robots, motion planning, grasping and sensor-based motion execution. 

Renaud Ronsse obtained his PhD in engineering from the Université de Liège in 2007. Thereafter, he took two post-doctoral fellowships, first at KULeuven (2007-2009), then at EPFL (2009-2010), working on the morphology and controller of a new rehabilitation robot for the lower-limb (FP7-ICT-FET EVRYON). During these research activities, he developed strong expertise in the modelling of human movements, both discrete and rhythmic, with transfer to original rehabilitation concepts for robotics applications. Dr Ronsse (co-)authored 17 publications in prestigious journals such as Journal of Neuroscience, Cebral Cortex, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and IEEE Transactions on Bio-medical Engineering. In 2010, Dr Ronsse joined the Centre for Research in Mechatronics at UCL, as an Assistant Professor.

Paul Fisette is full professor at the Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil engineering at UCL. He is developing research in multibody dynamics, symbolic programming and multiphysics modelling of mechatronic systems. He is author and co-author of more than 140 international journal and conference papers. Prof. Fisette will lead the activities related to the simulation developments.

Julien M. Hendricks received a PhD in mathematical engineering from UCL in 2008. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems of the MIT in 2009 and 2010. Since September 2010, he has been assistant professor (chargé de cours) at UCL, where he teaches automatic control and system identification. Dr. Hendrickx is the recipient of the 2008 EECI award for the best PhD thesis in Europe in the field of Embedded and Networked Control, and of the Alcatel-Lucent-Bell 2009 award for a PhD thesis on original new concepts or application in the domain of information or communication technologies. His research interests include various aspects of dynamical systems, including multi-agent and multi-robot systems, and system identification. He has co-authored more than 15 articles in prestigious journals such as IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, and has actively taken part to the STREP project Euler. He will support the project by providing expertise in systems identification.

Nicolas Docquier obtained his PhD in engineering from UCL in 2010, working on the modeling of railway pneumatic suspension. During his thesis and the following years, he developed research in multi-body dynamics and especially in coupling multi-body models with other disciplines such as pneumatics and hydraulics. He was therefore strongly involved in the development of the ROBOTRAN multi-body software. He is now working as a postdoctoral researcher of the Belgian fund for scientific research (F.R.S.-FNRS) targeting the coupling of multi-body dynamics with structural and soil dynamics so as to model the whole railway system (vehicle and infrastructure). He will support the project by providing expertise in multibody dynamics and simulation, especially for multi-physics issues.