Federica Ferraguti

About

Federica Ferraguti is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans human-robot interaction, safe collaborative robotics, and robotic surgery, establishing her as a leading voice in making robots both safer and more capable alongside humans. Her most influential contributions center on energy-based control strategies, particularly the development of tank-based impedance and admittance control frameworks. Her 2013 paper introducing variable stiffness through energy tank control (196 citations) and her 2015 work on interactive control for autonomous and teleoperated robotic surgery (220 citations) fundamentally advanced how robots can safely exchange energy with their environment while maintaining stability — a critical challenge in medical and industrial applications. Ferraguti has made equally significant strides in physical human-robot interaction, developing variable admittance control strategies (184 citations) and adaptive parameter methods (102 citations) that enable robots to respond fluidly and safely to human partners. Her more recent research on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) has provided rigorous mathematical tools for enforcing safety constraints in real-world collaborative cells, including compliance with ISO/TS 15066 industrial safety standards. With her work attracting over 1,300 combined citations across diverse topics — from affective robotics to augmented reality quality inspection — Ferraguti's research uniquely bridges theoretical rigor and practical industrial impact.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   An Energy Tank-Based Interactive Control Architecture for Autonomous and Teleoperated Robotic Surgery

   220 citations · 2015
2. 2
   A tank-based approach to impedance control with variable stiffness

   196 citations · 2013
3. 3
   A variable admittance control strategy for stable physical human–robot interaction

   184 citations · 2019
4. 4
   Human-robot coexistence and interaction in open industrial cells

   175 citations · 2019
5. 5
   Admittance control parameter adaptation for physical human-robot interaction

   102 citations · 2017
6. 6
   Relieving operators’ workload: Towards affective robotics in industrial scenarios

   87 citations · 2018
7. 7
   Safety barrier functions and multi-camera tracking for human–robot shared environment

   82 citations · 2019
8. 8
   A Control Barrier Function Approach for Maximizing Performance While Fulfilling to ISO/TS 15066 Regulations

   79 citations · 2020
9. 9
   Augmented reality based approach for on-line quality assessment of polished surfaces

   70 citations · 2019
10. 10
    Safety and Efficiency in Robotics: The Control Barrier Functions Approach

    69 citations · 2022

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links