Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Université de Lorraine, University of Patras, Larsen & Toubro (India), Centre Inria de l'Université de Lorraine
Papers
33
Total Citations
692
H-Index
14
About
Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis is a robotics and machine learning researcher whose work spans data-efficient reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation, and robot adaptation. His most influential contributions address one of robotics' central challenges: enabling robots to learn effective behaviors with minimal real-world experience. His 2017 work on reset-free trial-and-error learning for robot damage recovery (105 citations) demonstrated how robots could autonomously adapt to hardware failures without human intervention — a critical capability for deployment in hazardous environments. Complementing this, his black-box policy search framework (93 citations) established a compelling benchmark for data-efficient model-based reinforcement learning in robotics. Chatzilygeroudis has also made significant theoretical contributions through his survey of Quality-Diversity Optimization (77 citations), helping formalize this emerging branch of stochastic optimization. His influential "20 Years of Reality Gap" paper (58 citations) critically examined simulation-to-reality transfer in evolutionary robotics, a problem that continues to challenge the field. More recently, he has contributed rigorous benchmarking protocols for complex manipulation tasks, including human-to-robot handovers and bimanual manipulation of deformable objects. Collectively, his research advances the goal of building robots that learn faster, fail gracefully, and operate reliably in unstructured real-world settings.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Reset-free Trial-and-Error Learning for Robot Damage Recovery105 citations · 2017
- 2Black-box data-efficient policy search for robotics93 citations · 2017
- 3Quality-Diversity Optimization: A Novel Branch of Stochastic Optimization77 citations · 2021
- 420 years of reality gap58 citations · 2017
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- 6Benchmark for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation of Semi-Deformable Objects37 citations · 2020
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- 9On Force Synergies in Human Grasping Behavior22 citations · 2019
- 10Learning of Parameters in Behavior Trees for Movement Skills19 citations · 2021