Gennaro Notomista

I am a robotics researcher in the Rainbow team at the CNRS in Rennes, France. In my research, I am interested in robot design and control for long-duration autonomy, with the goal of letting robots remain operational over long time horizons, be resilient to changing environmental conditions, and safely interact with humans. More details here.

Starting from October 2021, I will be moving to Waterloo, Canada, to start as an assistant professor in systems and control at the University of Waterloo. If you are interested in working with me, don't hesitate to reach out!

My multi-scale quasiperiodic academic trajectory bounced multiple times between Italy and Germany, before crossing the Atlantic Ocean twice. I studied Mechanical and Automotive Engineering in Napoli and Ingolstadt, respectively, and completed a PhD in Robotics at Georgia Tech in the GRITS Lab advised by Dr. Magnus Egerstedt. Read more here.

I love playing the piano (and I pretend I can play the trumpet) with a particular preference for jazz and classical music. I enjoy cycling, reading, traveling, building cool robots, discussing future (almost always improbable, if not even absurd) robotics research directions with friends.

News
  • 2021/10/5 — Workshop Design, Learning, and Control for Safe Human-Robot Collaboration, organized together with Mario Selvaggio, Kelly Merckaert, and Valeria Villani will be held at ICAR 2021 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Check out the workshop website for more information!
  • 2021/9/20 — Paper on data-driven robust barrier functions accepted for publication in T-RO (pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2021/9/15 — Project Safety of Autonomous Vehicles Using Control Barrier Functions (in collaboration with Prof. Michael Botsch of the Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt) got funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. Looking forward to test new algorithms on autonomous vehicles at CARISSMA!
  • 2021/9/2 — Excited to serve as Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
  • 2021/8/22 — Paper on online robot trajectory optimization for persistent environmental monitoring (with Claudio Pacchierotti and Paolo Robuffo Giordano) accepted for publication in L-CSS
  • 2021/6/1 — Paper on safety of dynamical systems with non-convex unsafe sets (with Matteo Saveriano) accepted for publication in L-CSS (pre-print available on arXiv and video on YouTube, will be presented at CDC 2021)
  • 2021/5/10 — Paper on resilient task alloction for heterogeneous robot teams accepted for publication in T-RO (pre-print available on arXiv and video on YouTube)
  • 2021/2/28 — Workshop and papers at ICRA 2021:
    • Workshop Robot Swarms in the Real World: From Design to Deployment, organized together with Siddharth Mayya, Roderich Gross and Vijay Kumar, will be held in an online format on May 31 or June 4 (TBA). Check out the workshop website for more information!
    • Paper accepted on data-driven adaptive task allocation for heterogeneous multi-robot teams (with Yousef Emam, pre-print available on arXiv)
    • RA-L paper on the automation of the Robotarium will be presented at the conference
  • 2021/2/13 — New website is live!
  • 2021/2/9 — Paper The Robotarium: Automation of a Remotely Accessible, Multi-Robot Testbed accepted for publication in RA-L
  • 2020/12/4 — Paper on constraint learning with limited duration barrier functions (with Motoya Ohnishi) accepted for publication in Automatica (pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2020/10/3 — Paper on safe and passive robot teleoperation (with Jeremy Cai) accepted for presentation at HFR 2020 (pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2020/9/11 — Paper on interactive multi-robot painting (with María Santos and Siddharth Mayya) accepted for publication in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (section Robotic Control Systems). Check out articles about the work on BBC News and New Scientist!
  • 2020/6/27 — Paper on resilient task allocation accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Coordination at RSS 2020 (paper available on the workshop website and video on YouTube)
  • 2020/6/17 — The SlothBot is making itself comfortable in its new home, the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Check out the new video!
  • 2020/6/17 — Project What can robots teach us about the Covid-19 pandemic got funded by the Embassy of the United States in Rome through the 2020 Alumni Small Grants program
  • 2020/6/16 — Paper on integral control barrier functions (with Aaron Ames, Yorai Wardi and Magnus Egerstedt) accepted for publication in L-CSS (pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2020/2/27 — Paper on communication constrained distributed estimation accepted at the 2020 IFAC World Congress. Check out the video on YouTube!
  • 2020/1/21 — 3 papers accepted at ICRA 2020:
  • 2020/1/20 — Paper on persistification of robotic tasks accepted for publication in T-CST (pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2019/6/20 — 2 papers accepted at IROS 2019:
    • A Study of a Class of Vibration-Driven Robots: Modeling, Analysis, Control and Design of the Brushbot (with Siddharth Mayya, pre-print available on arXiv)
    • Non-Uniform Robot Densities in Vibration Driven Swarms Using Phase Separation Theory (with Siddharth Mayya, pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2019/6/17 — 2 papers accepted at MRS 2019:
    • Passivity-Based Decentralized Control of Multi-Robot Systems With Delays Using Control Barrier Functions (with Jeremy Cai and Junya Yamauchi, pre-print available on arXiv)
    • Decentralized Minimum-Energy Coverage Control for Time-Varying Density Functions (with María Santos and Siddharth Mayya, nominated for the outstanding paper award)
  • 2019/6/7 — The SlothBot is featured on Tech Briefs, Popular Mechanics and many other online blogs. Check out the videos on YouTube and on IEEE Spectrum Video Friday!
  • 2019/3/15 — Tutorial Control Barrier Functions: Theory and Applications, organized together with Aaron Ames, Samuel Coogan, Magnus Egerstedt, Koushil Sreenath and Paulo Tabuada, will be held at ECC 2019 in Napoli, Italy (pre-print of the tutorial paper available on arXiv)
  • 2019/2/20 — Paper on optimal task allocation for heterogeneous robot teams (with Siddharth Mayya) accepted at ECC 2019 (pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2019/2/19 — Swarm of 30 brushbots ready to be deployed! Thanks to Jeremy Cai and Yousef Emam) for the help in giving them life!
  • 2019/1/27 — Paper on constraint-driven control of multi-robot systems accepted at ACC 2019 (pre-print available on arXiv)
  • 2019/1/26 — Paper on coverage control for robots constrained on curves (with María Santos) accepted at ICRA 2019
  • 2019/1/26 — Paper on the design of the SlothBot (with Yousef Emam) accepted for publication in RA-L (will be presented at ICRA 2019)