Darwin G. Caldwell is the Founding Director of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy, where he is also the Director of the Dept. of Advanced Robotics. He received B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in robotics from the University of Hull, in 1986 and 1990, respectively, and an M.Sc. degree in management from the University of Salford, in 1994. He is an Honorary Professor at the Universities of Manchester, Sheffield, King’s College, the University of Bangor, U.K., and Tianjin University, China. He has authored over 747 publications with total citations of 21,515 and an h-index of 72 (Scopus) and has received over 50 awards/nominations at international conferences and events. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Giovanni Berselli is a Full Professor and Chair of Design Methods for Industrial Engineering at the University of Genova, Italy, and an Affiliated Researcher with the Advanced Robotics Department at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). Prof. Berselli is a Fellow of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and the Chair of the ASME Italy Section. He is also the past Chair of the ASME Technical Committee on Modeling, Dynamics, and Control of Adaptive Systems. He has been a Visiting & affiliated Scientist at Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital, at the German Aerospace Agency (DLR), at the University of Twente, at Monash University, and with the School of Advanced Studies of the University of Navarra. He has authored more than 200 publications in peer-reviewed international journals or conference proceedings and edited two international books. Berselli is a recipient of several ASME, IEEE, and IFToMM Best Paper Awards; he is a Scientific Advisor for the spin-off company Adaptronics S.r.l. and a Technical Advisor for the company PHM Technology. Prof. Berselli's scientific activity is focused on the design and experimental evaluation of (i) robot hands & grippers; (ii) compliant/soft mechanisms and actuators for safe human-robot interaction; (iii) energy-aware industrial robotics.
Jesús Ortiz works at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and he is currently the head of the Exoskeletons Lab (XoLab) at the Department of Advanced Robotics (ADVR). He received a Ph.D. degree in new automobile technologies from the University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain, in 2008. He worked as a Researcher in the Area of Transport and in the Area of Mechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Zaragoza. In 2004, he was a Guest Professor with the “ENSI de Bourges”.
His Principal research field is industrial exoskeletons and soft wearable assistive devices. Previous research experience includes motion bases, driving simulators, teleoperation, telepresence, tele-existence, virtual reality, GPGPU computing, and medical robotics. He has participated in six European Projects, being the coordinator of the XoSoft EU Project, and in more than ten international and national
projects, including the management of a recent project funded by the Italian Workers Compensation Authority (INAIL). He was published in over 70 international publications. He received two awards in 2005 for two different research works about teleoperation and driving simulators, and in CLAWAR, WeRob, and CBS conferences for his works on exoskeletons.
