About me

I am a senior research scientist/research director (directrice de recherche) in the Inria Center of the University of Lorraine (formerly Inria Nancy Grand-Est) and Loria, and head of the Human Centered Robotics Team (HUCEBOT).  My research is currently focused on robots collaborating with humans. I am interested in combining machine learning with control to improve the prediction, adaptation, and interaction skills of robots. I strongly believe in user evaluation, i.e., making potential end-users evaluate our technologies, to improve usability, trust, and acceptance.

When I joined Inria in 2014, I was one of the founding members of the team LARSEN. Before joining Inria, I was a postdoc in the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab of TU Darmstadt (Germany), with Jan Peters, and in the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) in Paris (France), with Olivier Sigaud and Vincent Padois. I obtained my PhD at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (Italy) with Francesco Nori and Giorgio Metta in 2011. I defended my French Habilitation to Direct Research (HDR) in November 2022.

I served as the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics (2021-2024). I served as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2017-2021), for which I received the IEEE RA-L Distinguished Service Award as Outstanding Associate Editor. I was the Program Chair of IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2019 and  IEEE ARSO 2023. I was the General Chair of IEEE-RAS HUMANOIDS 2024 – co-located with the 1st euROBIN coopetition, which made together the International Robotics Week 2024 in Nancy.

I served the GDR Robotique (the French Robotics Society) as co-lead of the GT7 Humanoid Robotics (2021-2023); I have been serving IEEE RAS as co-chair of the ICRA Steering Committee (2022-2023) and since 2022 I am Associate Vice-President of the IEEE RAS MAB.

I obtained the Suzanne Zivi Award 2020 for excellence in research and was nominated by Robohub and Women in Robotics in the list of “50 Women in Robotics you need to know about” in 2021. I was one of the Judges of the ANA Avatar Xprize competition where robots were teleoperated to be avatars!

I am currently involved in the following projects:

  • PEPR O2R “Robotique Organique” – Action Structurante AS3 “Decision, Learning and Social Interaction” (FR, ANR France 2030, coord.)
  • EuROBIN (EU, Horizon, PI): network of excellence in robotics and AI – leading the Inria robotics team in the Personal Robotics challenge
  • EXOSIM (FR, LUE, PI): to investigate active exoskeletons to support the hospital staff, collaboration with CHRU Nancy
  • ATOR (FR, DGA-Inria): to investigate assistive teleoperation of robots
  • ENACT (FR, France2030 AI cluster): to investigate the use of LLMs for robotics
  • EXOCODESIM (FR, France 2030 COMS@N): pre-maturation to investigate light exoskeletons

Upcoming events:

Past events: