Leonardo F. Dos Santos

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About

Leonardo F. Dos Santos is a rising force in the field of wearable robotics and physical human-robot interaction, with a focus on making robotic exoskeletons feel invisible to their users. His core research centers on **transparency control**—the challenge of designing cooperative control systems that allow a robot to move so naturally alongside a human that it becomes imperceptible. This work is critical for rehabilitation robots, power augmentation suits, and haptic devices, where seamless interaction is paramount. Dos Santos’s most influential contribution, his 2022 paper on "Markovian Transparency Control of an Exoskeleton Robot" (13 citations), tackles the fundamental difficulty of unpredictable human movement and user-dependent behavior. He has further advanced the field by integrating **IMU-based sensing** and **Series Elastic Actuators** to achieve this transparency, and by building dedicated test benches for **impedance control**—a key method for managing interaction forces. His work directly addresses the complex coupling between human and machine, pushing toward exoskeletons that can mirror user actions as naturally as possible. With a growing citation record and a clear trajectory toward practical, high-performance wearable systems, Dos Santos is establishing himself as a key innovator in making assistive robots truly transparent to their users.