Gabriele Abbate

About

Gabriele Abbate is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction (HRI), gesture recognition, and social robotics. His research is primarily focused on enabling intuitive, natural communication between humans and robots — particularly through pointing gestures sensed by wrist-worn inertial measurement units (IMUs) and gaze-based cues. Abbate's most influential contribution, "Proximity Human-Robot Interaction Using Pointing Gestures and a Wrist-mounted IMU" (2019, 42 citations), introduced a novel system allowing operators to seamlessly direct co-located mobile robots through natural pointing, without requiring explicit activation commands. This work laid the foundation for his subsequent developments, including the open-source ROS toolkit PointIt and applications in virtual reality logistics environments. A recurring theme in Abbate's research is proactive robot behavior: his work on predicting users' intentions to interact — leveraging self-supervised learning, gaze detection, and sequence classifiers — allows service robots to anticipate human needs before explicit engagement occurs. His real-world deployment of a chocolate-offering service robot demonstrates the practical viability of these systems. With over 100 cumulative citations and contributions spanning industrial control systems compliant with IEC 61499 standards, Abbate bridges academic research and applied robotics, making him a noteworthy emerging voice in human-robot interaction and intelligent service systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Proximity Human-Robot Interaction Using Pointing Gestures and a Wrist-mounted IMU

   42 citations · 2019
2. 2
   Self-supervised prediction of the intention to interact with a service robot

   22 citations · 2023
3. 3
   Interacting with a Conveyor Belt in Virtual Reality using Pointing Gestures

   11 citations · 2022
4. 4
   Predicting the Intention to Interact with a Service Robot: the Role of Gaze Cues

   7 citations · 2024
5. 5
   A Service Robot in the Wild: Analysis of Users Intentions, Robot Behaviors, and Their Impact on the Interaction

   6 citations · 2024
6. 6
   A Long-Range Mutual Gaze Detector for HRI

   4 citations · 2024
7. 7
   PointIt: A ROS Toolkit for Interacting with Co-located Robots using Pointing Gestures

   4 citations · 2022
8. 8
   Video: Pointing Gestures for Proximity Interaction

   3 citations · 2019
9. 9
   Pointing at Moving Robots: Detecting Events from Wrist IMU Data

   2 citations · 2021
10. 10
    Towards the integration of a pointing-based human-machine interface in an industrial control system compliant with the IEC 61499 standard

    2 citations · 2022

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links