Lucia Pallottino

Full Professor
Research Center "E. Piaggio" (Director)
Department of Information Engineering 

University of Pisa
Largo L. Lazzarino 2,
56100 Pisa, Italy
Tel. +39 050 2217057
lucia.pallottino(at)unipi.it

Curriculum Vitae (ITA) (ENG) - Updated February 2024

Teaching Activities (In Italian - Corsi, Tesi)

Research Activities (Under Construction)

List of publications, Scopus, Scholar, Orcid 

Media Coverage 


Lucia Pallottino is currently Full Professor at the Centro di Ricerca "E. Piaggio" and the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione at the University of Pisa.  She received the "Laurea" degree in Mathematics from the Department of Mathematics in the University of Pisa in 1998. She got a Doctoral degree in Robotics and Industrial Automation at Centro "E. Piaggio" at the Faculty of Engineering, in January 2002. She has been Assistant Professor from 2007 to 2015 and Associate Professor until 2023. She has been Visiting Scholar at M.I.T. (2000-2001) in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS ). She has been Visiting Researcher at UCLA, (2004) in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department (MAE ).

She is (or has been)
- Director of Centro di Ricerca "E. Piaggio" (since Jan. 2023);
- Deputy Director of Centro di Ricerca "E. Piaggio" (Jan. 2017- Dec. 2022);
- Responsible of the CrossLab in Advanced Manufacturing (2018-2020);
- Co-founder of  Proxima robotics srl, Spin-off of the University of Pisa;
- Chair of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Italian Chapter (I-RAS) (Jan. 2015- Dec. 2018);
- Senior Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (since 2020), Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (Since 2021), Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2017-2020) and of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics (2014-2017).

- Principal Investigator of the DeCAIR Erasmus+ European project.
- Scientific collaborator in the DARKO European project.
- Principal Investigator of the ILIAD European project.
- Scientific collaborator in the WALK-MAN European project.

Her main research interests within Robotics are in motion planning and control, optimal control, coordination of multi–robot systems, distributed algorithms.

She has published more than 90 papers in International Journal and Conferences (Google scholar h–index=26, Scopus h-index =21).

Awards 

Finalist of the "2019 ICRA Best Paper Award on Human-Robot Interaction" for the paper: "Deconfliction of Motion Paths with Traffic Inspired Rules in Robot-Robot and Human-Robot Interaction'' by F. Celi, L. Wang, L. Pallottino, M. Egerstedt published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 2227-2234, 2019.

Receipient of the 2019 RAS Chapter of the Year Award as the Chair of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Italian Chapter, with co-chair Andrea Maria Zanchettin.

Recipient of the  "IEEE-RAS Italian Chapter Young Author Best Paper Award 2009" for the paper: L. Pallottino, V.G. Scordio, A. Bicchi, E. Frazzoli, "Decentralized cooperative policy for conflict resolution in multivehicle systems," on IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 23 (6):1170-1183, 2007.

Top 10 Best Research Papers (2000 to 2009) in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems}: L. Pallottino, E. M. Feron, and A. Bicchi, ``Conflict resolution problems for air traffic management systems solved with mixed integer programming,'' IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 311, March 2002.

She has served IEEE (CASE, ICRA, IVS, IROS, ARMS, IRAM, SAC) as a Program Committee member and was a co-chair of the Technical Program Committee of CONET2012 workshop. She is also external Reviewer for research projects such as the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the Computer Sciences and Engineering field, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for “Discovery Grant” research projects and the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) in Brussels.

She has supervised more than 60 Master Thesis.

Former Ph.D. Sudents:

  • Vincenzo Giovanni Scordio, "Decentralized traffic management of multi-agent systems", 2006.  Currently Industrial Automation Consultant and Contractor in Italy.
  • Paolo Salaris, "From Optimal Synthesis to Optimal Visual Servoing for Autonomous Vehicles", 2011. Currently Assistant Professor at the University of Pisa.
  • Jose Manuel Bonilla Jimenez, "Constrained motion planning and execution for soft robots", 2016. Currently Robotics and Automation Engineer (SDE) at Amazon.
  • Mirko Ferrati, "Distributed Planning for Legged and Mobile Robots From single footsteps to distributed coordination with a time expanded approach", 2016. Currently Robotics Engineering Manager at Canonical.
  • Alessandro Settimi, "Primitive based hierarchical planning for humanoid robots", 2017. CEO of Proxima Robotics s.r.l.
  • Simone Nardi, "A game theoretic approach for multi-robot coordination to guarantee security in critical scenarios, from theory to real applications", Ph.D. in Mathematics, 2017. Currently Technical Program Manager at Mermec Engineering.
  • Anna Mannucci, "Intra-logistics with integrated automatic deployment: from one to multi-mobile robot systems", 2020. Currently Scientist / Engineer at Robert Bosch Gmb.
  • Chiara Gabellieri, "The role of interaction forces in robotic manipulation for logistics: a special focus on depalletizing and object delivery", 2021. Currently Assistant Professor at the University of Twente.
  • Federico Massa, "Development of the navigation stack of a full-scale autonomous racing car", 2021. Currently Software Engineering at Nuro.
  • Grazia Zambella, "Design of whole-body balancing and recovery control for humanoid robots", 2023. Currently University Assistant Technische Universität Wien. 
  • Alessandro Palleschi, "Shaping the Intelligence of Collaborative Robots in Interaction-Rich Shared Environments", 2023.  

Current Ph.D. Sudents:

  • Elisa Stefanini (Expected July 2024) 
  • Olga Napolitano (Expected July 2024) 
  • Valeria Sarno (Expected July 2025)
  • Elena Stracca (Expected July 2026)
  • Davide De Benedittis (Expected July 2026)