Nadia Figueroa, Ph.D.

• Safety, Adaptation and Efficient Learning in Physical Human-Robot Interaction •

I am the Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) Department at the University of Pennsylvania. I hold a secondary appointment in the Computer and Information Science (CIS) department and am a faculty advisor at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) laboratory. Before joining Penn, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), advised by Prof. Julie A. Shah. I obtained a Ph.D. in Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), advised by Prof. Aude Billard. Prior to this, I spent time as a Research Assistant in the Robotics and Mechatronics Institute at the German Aerospace Center and at NYU Abu Dhabi. I hold a B.Sc. in Mechatronics from Monterrey Tech and M.Sc. in Automation and Robotics from TU Dortmund.

Email • LinkedIn • CV (updated 2/24) • Short Bio • Google Scholar

Figueroa Robotics Lab @ Penn

The research conducted in my lab (established in August 2022) focuses on developing safety, control, estimation and learning algorithms for collaborative human-aware robotic systems: robots that can safely and efficiently interact and physically collaborate with humans and other robots in the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit. This involves research at the intersection of machine learning, control theory, artificial intelligence, perception, and psychology - with a physical human-robot interaction perspective.

Figueroa Lab Github • Figueroa Lab Youtube Channel • Prof. Figueroa's PhD Thesis • Textbook on "Learning for Adaptive and Reactive Robot Control: A DS Approach"

Ph.D. Students
  • Tianyu Li (MEAM '27; learning, perception and control for pHRI)
  • Yifan Xue (MEAM '27; safety and robust control for interactive agents)
  • Shafagh Keyvanian (MEAM '27; learning-based robot-assisted rehabilitation, co-advised with Michelle Johnson)
  • Farhad Nawaz (ESE '26; learning and control for dynamical systems, co-advised with Nik Matni)
  • Yifei Shao (CIS '27; estimation and control for pHRI, co-advised by Vijay Kumar and Pratik Chaudhari)
  • Enrico Martini (Visiting CIS PhD student from University of Verona, Italy; real-time constraint-aware 3D human pose tracking, advised by Nicola Bombieri)
Master Student Researchers
  • Ho Jin Choi (MEAM ‘24; MS Thesis on "Visuo-tactile Active Exploration", additional work on dynamic grasping, active mapping and eeg-based control co-advised by Ruzena Bajcsy)
  • Haihui Gao (MEAM/ESE ‘24; MS Thesis on "Learning Second Order Dynamical System Motion Policies")
  • Shaoting Peng (ROBO ‘24; object permanence filter for robust tracking, eeg-based control co-advised by Ruzena Bajcsy)
  • Satyajeet Das (ESE ‘24; MS Thesis on "Dynamic Signed Distance Functions for Real-Time Control", additional work on eeg-based control co-advised by Ruzena Bajcsy)
  • Zhiquan Zhang (ESE ‘24; MS Thesis on "Real-Time Safety-Critical Passive Torque Control with Learning-based Constraints")
  • Haoming Li (ESE ‘24; MS Thesis on "Lipschitz Continuity of Neural Network based Signed Distance Functions")
  • Parth Sanghavi (MEAM ‘24; Independent Study on "Accelerated 6D Object Pose Estimation")
  • Lance Tan (DATS ‘24; Independent Study on "Learning Kinematic to Dynamic Constraint Mapping Functions")
  • George Gao (ROBO ‘25; Independent Study on "Learning Safe Dynamical Systems with Diffusion")
  • Paul (Sanhyub) Lee (ROBO ‘25; Independent Study on "Real-time Force Prediction with Wearable Ultrasonic Sensors")
Research Engineers
  • Harshil Parekh (ROBO ‘23; integration of perception with reactive control)
  • Sunan Sun (ROBO ‘23; statistics, learning, non-Euclidean geometry)
External PhD/PostDoc Collaborators Alumni
  • Dr. Laura Hallock (Penn MEAM, co-advised by Vijay Kumar and Michelle Johnson -- now Assistant Professor at Univerity of Utah)
  • Qi Xue (CIS ‘24; Independent Study on "Energy Analysis of Safe Drone Control Strategies")
  • Vaibhav Wanere (MEAM ‘24; Independent Study on "Learning Complex Motion Skills")
  • Atharva Makarand Pradhan (MEAM ‘24; Independent Study on "Glove-based Teleoperation of Hand-Arm System")

Recent Talk

Keynote talk at L4DC 2024 on "Safety, Adaptation and Efficient Learning in Physical Human-Robot Interaction: A Dynamical Systems Approach."

News & Media Coverage
Invited Talks and Lectures
Honors and Awards
Publications
Teaching
robo

University of Pennsylania (Penn)
MEAM-520 Introduction to Robotics (Spring 2022/Spring 2023/Fall 2023/Spring 2024)
Professor/Lecturer.
Final project demos:

csvm

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
MICRO-401 Machine Learning Programming (Fall 2016/Fall 2017)
Head Teaching Assistant and Main Syllabus Architect and Developer.
MICRO-570 Advanced Machine Learning (Spring 2016/2017)
Head Teaching Assistant and Tutorial Developer.
MICRO-455 Applied Machine Learning (Fall 2015)
Teaching Assistant.
Co-developer of ML_toolbox .


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