For his outstanding research contributions to the implementation of a sense of touch in robots, Prof. Roberto Calandra, who holds the Chair of Explainable Artificial Intelligence at TUD Dresden University of Technology and is a researcher at the Cluster of Excellence Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI), received the IEEE Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation on May 16, 2024. Prof. Calandra received the award at a festive ceremony during the annual IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA 2024) in Yokohama. The award, endowed with USD 1,000, a certificate and a plaque, is sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) and the IEEE Foundation.

Roberto Calandra accepts the award, which is funded by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society through an endowment managed by the IEEE Foundation, for his “contributions to touch sensing, processing and its application to manipulation." The award recognizes the work he and his team have done in the field of touch sensing - from hardware design and software development to applications in the field of gripping.

“I am honored to receive this award from the IEEE Robotics Society. As the sense of touch is becoming increasingly important as a sense of perception, we will continue to work on its democratization and numerous applications. Our team has achieved very good results which we are building our further research on,” Roberto Calandra says about his success.

Roberto Calandra has been researching and teaching robotics at TU Dresden since 2023. He is particularly interested in exploring how robots can become helpful companions in everyday life. In this context, understanding the processing of tactile signals in robots is crucial, as this is a way of improving interaction between humans and machines. One of his research interests, in collaboration with METRICS (Stanford University) and the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT/UCC) Dresden, is on how the use of touch sensing can help in the early detection of cancer. The scientists are developing robotic hands that can use vision-based tactile sensors to “feel” the type, shape and density of materials, and surface texture. They also achieve the strength and spatial resolution of human fingertips. 

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Prof. Calandra founded the Robotic Lab in Menlo Park (now part of Embodies AI) at Meta AI (formerly Facebook AI Research), and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (US) in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. His contributions include the development and marketing of DIGIT - the first commercially available, high-resolution, compact touch sensor most commonly used in robotics. Prof. Calandra was Program Chair of AISTATS 2020, guest editor of the JMLR special issue on Bayesian optimization, and has co-organized more than 16 international workshops to date (including at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICRA, IROS, RSS).

Background: IEEE Early Academic Career Award

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) has been presenting the award since 1999, with the aim of recognizing young academics who have made influential and impactful contributions to the field of robotics and automation. In doing so, it recognizes outstanding technical achievements and services as well as educational contributions to robotics and automation.

Any current member of RAS who is in the early stages of their career in robotics and/or automation - that is, less than seven years after their PhD has been completed - is eligible to enter.

Prof. Calandra of TUD joins the ranks of promising researchers in robotics such as Pulkit Agrawal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), Josie Hughes (EPFL Switzerland), Lerrel Pinto (New York University, USA), Jiangfan Yu (University of Hong Kong, China), Cosimo Della Santina (TU Delft, Netherlands), Nikolay Atanasov (UC San Diego, USA) or Dorsa Sadigh (Stanford University, USA).