Panagiotis Papadakis
Sapienza University of Rome, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, IMT Atlantique, Laboratoire des Sciences et Techniques de l’Information de la Communication et de la Connaissance, Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Papers
23
Total Citations
537
H-Index
12
About
Panagiotis Papadakis is a leading researcher in field and service robotics, with a focus on human-robot teaming, social navigation, and autonomous systems for disaster response. His most impactful work stems from the 2012 Mirandola, Italy earthquakes, where his field report on deploying rescue robots in real-world rubble (135 citations) provides a seminal case study in emergency robotics. Papadakis has fundamentally advanced how robots perceive and interact with humans, developing adaptive social spacing algorithms that allow robots to respect personal boundaries (41 citations) and creating “social mapping” techniques that enable machines to learn implicit human conventions in populated environments (40 citations). His contributions to urban search and rescue (USAR) are particularly notable; his work on human-robot teaming (88 citations) established user-centric design principles for coordinating multiple robots and human operators during crises. Beyond disaster scenarios, he has pioneered reinforcement learning for reconfigurable tracked robots to autonomously negotiate staircases (20 citations) and developed hierarchical LSTM networks for recognizing activities of daily living (17 citations), supporting assistive robotics for frail individuals. With over 400 total citations across his portfolio, Papadakis’s research bridges the gap between robust field deployment and socially intelligent robot behavior, making him a key figure in creating robots that can both save lives and integrate seamlessly into human spaces.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Rescue robots at earthquake-hit Mirandola, Italy: A field report135 citations · 2012
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- 3Adaptive spacing in human-robot interactions41 citations · 2014
- 4Social mapping of human-populated environments by implicit function learning40 citations · 2013
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- 6A Unified Framework for Planning and Execution-Monitoring of Mobile Robots25 citations · 2011
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- 8Experience in system design for human-robot teaming in urban search & rescue21 citations · 2025
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