Sylvain Calinon
Dr Sylvain Calinon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He heads the Robot Learning & Interaction group at Idiap, with expertise in robot learning, optimal control and human-robot collaboration.
His research focuses on human-centered robotics applications in which the robots can acquire new skills from only few demonstrations and interactions. It requires the development of models that can rely on the structure and geometry of data, the development of optimal control techniques that can exploit task variations and coordination patterns, and the development of intuitive interfaces to acquire meaningful demonstrations.
The approaches developed in his group can be applied to a wide range of applications requiring manipulation skills, with robots that are either close to us (assistive and industrial robots), parts of us (prosthetics and exoskeletons), or far away from us (shared control and teleoperation). His research is supported by the European Commission, by the Swiss National Science Foundation, by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, and by the Swiss Innovation Agency.
