Papers
14
Total Citations
290
H-Index
11
About
Luca Scimeca is a leading researcher at the intersection of soft robotics, tactile sensing, and autonomous manipulation. His work centers on endowing robots with the ability to perceive and interact with soft, deformable objects—from fruit to human tissue—using non-destructive, adaptive techniques. A major contribution is the development of model-free, soft-structure reconstruction for proprioception using tactile arrays (57 citations), which allows continuum robots to sense their own shape. He has pioneered multi-point soft haptics for agricultural assessment, notably a non-destructive method to evaluate mango ripeness (40 citations), and has advanced medical palpation by creating an abdominal phantom with tunable stiffness nodules for training (27 citations). His research on action augmentation of tactile perception for soft-body palpation (31 citations) and structuring tactile information for category formation (24 citations) has deepened understanding of how physical interactions shape sensory data. Scimeca has also explored expressive robot control, such as Gaussian process inference for piano playing (15 citations), and contributed to the World Robot Summit’s industrial assembly challenge (21 citations). With over 260 total citations, his work is shaping the future of soft, sensor-rich robotic systems for healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 3Action Augmentation of Tactile Perception for Soft-Body Palpation31 citations · 2021
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- 8Achieving Robotically Peeled Lettuce16 citations · 2018
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- 10Efficient Bayesian Exploration for Soft Morphology-Action Co-optimization12 citations · 2020