Antonello Scaldaferri

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Antonello Scaldaferri is a robotics researcher whose work spans legged locomotion and agricultural automation, with a focus on bridging simulation and real-world deployment. His most prominent contribution is the design and control of **Otto**, an 8-degree-of-freedom quadrupedal robot driven by Series Elastic Actuators (SEA). In his 2025 paper on the subject (4 citations), Scaldaferri introduced a lightweight mechanical architecture paired with a reinforcement learning (RL) training framework that enables dynamic locomotion policies to be learned entirely in simulation and transferred to hardware—a significant step toward more agile, energy-efficient legged robots. He further advanced adaptive locomotion in his 2024 work on “Learning to Walk with Adaptive Feet” (2 citations), which tackles the challenge of maintaining stability on rough terrain through foot adaptation strategies. Beyond quadrupedal robotics, Scaldaferri has applied perception and machine learning to precision agriculture: his 2021 paper on grapevine winter pruning (2 citations) developed a semantic-instance-aware plant model for detecting precise pruning points, aiming to automate a labor-intensive task requiring 80–120 hours per hectare annually. Together, his work demonstrates a rare versatility—from hardware design and RL-based control to agricultural perception—positioning him as a researcher who not only advances robotic mobility but also tackles real-world automation challenges with measurable impact.