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Guillem Alenyà

Perception and Manipulation Group
Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial
CSIC-UPC Llorens Artigas, 4-6
08028, Barcelona
+34 93 4011901
galenya (at) iri.upc.edu
Institutional page

Guillem Alenyà is Researcher and Director at the Institut de Robotica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI), a joint centre of the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC) and Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). He received a PhD degree (Doctor Europeus) from UPC in 2007 with a work on egomotion using active contours. From this seminal work, he became a pioneer in Time-of-Flight cameras for robotic manipulation of deformable objects (first using plants and later garments). In the last 5 years, he has contributed novel approaches to the areas of learning and HRI devoted to facilitate the introduction of robots in human environments, principally in the fields of assistive robotics and garment manipulation.

He has been visitor at KIT-Karlsruhe (2007), INRIA-Grenoble (2008), BRL-Bristol(2016) and NYCU-Taiwan (2024,2025).
He has published more than 150 papers in the best journals and conferences in the area. He has coordinated and participated in numerous scientific and technological transfer projects involving image understanding, next-best-view, rule learning from human examples and planing execution tasks.

He is currently promoting LabORA, a new Open Lab devoted to bringing Assistive Robotics closer to societal needs. This is an 800m2 new facility with an initial investment of 2.5M€ accompanied by the creation of a promoting group initially composed of >10 other research groups, hospitals, day-care facilities, service and technology industries, and governmental agencies.

He has made a growing effort to transfer knowledge to society. Thanks to this, he has obtained more than 10 technology-transfer projects, he is the holder of 2 patents, and the founder of the spin-off company DATISION.

Research interests & selected recent publications

  • Robot adaptation for assistive robotics

  1. A. Civit, A. Andriella, C. Barrue, M. Antonio, C. Boqué, and G. Alenyà, “Introducing social robots to assess frailty in older adults,” in ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2024, pp. 342–346.
  2. A. Andriella, C. Torras, C. Abdelnour, and G. Alenyà, “Introducing CARESSER: A framework for in situ learning robot social assistance from expert knowledge and demonstrations,” User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, vol. 33, pp. 441–496, 2023.
  3. A. Andriella, C. Torras, and G. Alenyà, “Short-Term Human-Robot Interaction Adaptability in Real-World Environments,” International Journal of Social Robotics, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 639–657, 2020.
  4. A. Andriella, C. Torras, and G. Alenyà, “Cognitive System Framework for Brain-Training Exercise Based on Human-Robot Interaction,” Cognitive Computation, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 793–810, 2020.

  • Learning from Human robot interaction in tasks involving contact

  1. G. Canal, C. Torras, and G. Alenyà, “Generating predicate suggestions based on the space of plans: an example of planning with preferences,” User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, vol. 33, pp. 333–357, 2023.
  2. A. Suarez, A. Andriella, C. Torras, and G. Alenyà, “User interactions and negative examples to improve the learning of semantic rules in a cognitive exercise scenario,” in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2023, pp. 17953–7960.
  3. G. Canal, C. Torras, and G. Alenyà, “Are preferences useful for better assistance?: A Physically Assistive Robotics user study,” ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 1–19, 2021.
  4. R. Jangir, G. Alenya, and C. Torras, “Dynamic Cloth Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2020, pp. 4630–4636.

  • Decision making and knowledge representation in HRI

  1. C. Barrue, A. Suarez, M. Inzitari, A. Ribera, and G. Alenyà, “NYAM: the role of configurable engagement strategies in robotic-assisted feeding,” in ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2024, pp. 228–232.
  2. A. Olivares-Alarcos, A. Andriella, S. Foix, and G. Alenyà, “Robot explanatory narratives of collaborative and adaptive experiences,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2023, pp. 11964–11971.
  3. A. Olivares-Alarcos, S. Foix, S. Borgo, and G. Alenyà, “OCRA - An ontology for collaborative robotics and adaptation,” Computers in industry, vol. 132, p. 103627, 2022.
  4. S. Izquierdo, G. Canal, C. Rizzo, and G. Alenyà, “Improved Task Planning through Failure Anticipation in Human-Robot Collaboration,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2022, pp. 7875–7880.

  • Benchmarking, vision and grasping of deformables

  1. (missing reference)
  2. E. Corona, G. Alenyà, G. Pons-Moll, and F. Moreno-Noguer, “LayerNet: High-Resolution Semantic 3D Reconstruction of Clothed People,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 1257–1272, 2024.
  3. I. Garcia-Camacho, J. Borràs, B. Calli, A. Norton, and G. Alenyà, “Household cloth object set: Fostering benchmarking in deformable object manipulation,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 5866–5873, 2022.
  4. J. Borràs, G. Alenyà, and C. Torras, “A grasping-centered analysis for cloth manipulation,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 924–936, 2020.
  5. I. Garcia-Camacho, M. Lippi, M. C. Welle, H. Yin, R. Antanova, A. Varava, J. B. Sol, C. Torras, A. Marino, G. Alenyà, and D. Kragic, “Benchmarking bimanual cloth manipulation,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1111–1118, 2020.

Recent projects

  • ARISE is a EU-DIGITIAL-EMERGING project to develop the new generation of intelligent robots.
  • ROMANDIC is a EU-WIDERA project to contribute to the manipulation of deformable objects.
  • TRAIL is a MSCA-DN about transparency in robotics.
  • DEMETER 5.0 is an AEI “Lineas Estrategicas” project where we investigate robots fof manipulation of fragile objects like cotton balls.
  • CHLOE-Map is an AEI “Retos” project to study the configuration space of cloth-like objects.
  • ROB-IN is an AEI “Lineas Estrategicas” project about personalization and explainability for assistive robots.
  • FRAILWATCH is a BCN ciencia project about using robots to measure frailty in hospitals.

Current Students and collaborators

  1. Irene Garcia (PhD student - project grant) Benchmarks for garment manipulation
  2. George Tzelepis (PhD student - project grant) Recognition and Learning of Garment Manipulation
  3. Silvia Izquierdo (PhD student - Vicente Lopez grant (EURECAT)) Assistive cognitive co-workers
  4. Tamlin Love (PhD student - TRAIL DN) Fostering human-robot mutual understanding by explaining the internal beliefs
  5. Aniol Civit (PhD student - FI Grant) Personalization and adaptation in robotic assisted tasks
  6. Mahed Dadgostar (PhD student - FPI Grant) Robotic skills for the dynamic manipulation of highly deformable objects