Carlo Alessi is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Robotics and AI at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa. He is a member of the Humanoid Sensing and Perception group, led by Dr. Lorenzo Natale. His research interests are in learning-based robot perception and manipulation in unstructured environments, using imitation learning from real-world demonstrations and reinforcement learning in simulation.
Carlo earned his Ph.D. in Biorobotics (2024) from the BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa. His dissertation, Control of Soft Manipulators for Interaction Tasks Combining Continuum Mechanical Models and Deep Reinforcement Learning, advanced soft robotic manipulation in the real world, leveraging Cosserat rod models, control by reinforcement learning, and sim-to-real transfer. He was advised by Prof. Egidio Falotico and Prof. Alessandro Lucantonio. He was visiting Ph.D. student at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, advised by Prof. Helmut Hauser.
Before the doctorate, he received an M.Sc. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Pisa. He gained international experience as an Erasmus+ visiting student at the Technical University of Munich (2019), the University of Barcelona (2018), and the University of Bristol (2016–17). He also completed a Software Engineering internship at Nokia UK (2017).
