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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 a 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 facilitating the introduction of robots in human environments, principally in the fields of assistive robotics and garment manipulation.

He has been a 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 planning 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. A. Longhini, Y. Wang, I. Garcia-Camacho, D. Blanco-Mulero, M. Moletta, M. Welle, G. Alenyà, H. Yin, Z. Erickson, D. Held, J. Borràs, and D. Kragic, “Unfolding the Literature: A Review of Robotic Cloth Manipulation,” Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, vol. 8, 2025.
  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

  • FLEXCYCLEis a EU-DIGITAL-EMERGING project to develop flexible robotic solutions for the recycling of soft materials.
  • SWEET is a MSCA-DN about social awareness for service robots.
  • RoboCAT is a NextGeneration EU funded project to develop assistive robots in Catalonia.
  • 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.
  • CHLOE-Map is an AEI “Retos” project to study the configuration space of cloth-like objects.

Current Students and collaborators

  1. Cristian Barrue Coordinator at LabORA

  2. Alberto Olivares PostDoc ARISE
  3. Antonio Gabas PostDoc ALLIES
  4. Pedro Miguel Orvalho Marques Da Silva PostDoc Ramon Llull

  5. Irene Garcia PostDoc FlexCycle

  6. Tanakrit Lertcompeesin Project support ADMIT
  7. Giuliano de Julio Project support ADMIT
  8. Lara Sola Project support ROSPIA

  9. Yi Tian Project support FRAILWATCH

  10. George Tzelepis (PhD candidate - project grant) Recognition and Learning of Garment Manipulation
  11. Tamlin Love (PhD candidate - TRAIL DN) Fostering human-robot mutual understanding by explaining the internal beliefs
  12. Aniol Civit (PhD candidate - FI Grant) Personalization and adaptation in robotic assisted tasks
  13. Mahed Dadgostar (PhD candidate - FPI Grant) Robotic skills for the dynamic manipulation of highly deformable objects
  14. Jefimija Borojevic (PhD candidate - SWEET DN) Adaptive and adaptable robot decision making for service robots
  15. Victor Bermejo (PhD candidate - FI-STEP Grant) Processos democràtics de disseny i implementació de tecnologies robòtiques i de IA