Alessandro Roncone

Alessandro Roncone's picture
Postdoctoral Associate
Address: 
51 Prospect St, New Haven, CT 06511-8937
1 203 432 1229

Alessandro Roncone is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Social Robotics Lab in Yale University, under the supervision of Prof. Brian Scassellati. The scope of his current research is within the larger field of human–robot collaboration and advanced manufacturing. He implements transparent, human–centered technologies where robots transition from being recipients of human instructions to becoming proficient and proactive collaborators. He incorporates natural language into classical task planning algorithms, with the goal of developing robots that are able to: i) provide effective support to the human when he needs it the most; ii) learn complex hierarchical representations from single instructions; iii) proactively ask questions and provide contextual information to query and share internal states and intents.

Alessandro Roncone received his B.Sc. summa cum laude in Biomedical Engineering in February 2008, and his M.Sc. summa cum laude in NeuroEngineering in July 2011 from University of Genoa, Italy. In April 2015 he completed his Ph.D. in Robotics, Cognition and Interaction Technologies from University of Genoa and Italian Institute of Technology [IIT], working in the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the iCub Facility departments under the supervision of Prof. Giorgio Metta. The goal of his Ph.D. project was to exploit insights from the neurosciences in order to improve the sensorimotor capabilities of the iCub humanoid robot. His research also made contributions to the field of optimization-based approaches to inverse kinematics and robot control. Specifically, he implemented a state of the art gaze stabilization framework—later integrated with an existing gaze controller. His work in the topic formally solved the problem of controlling a binocular head to foveate toward an arbitrary 3D point in space, and concurrently exploiting redundancy to stabilize gaze at the same time.