Papers
8
Total Citations
155
H-Index
5
About
Sammy Christen is a robotics and AI researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, computer vision, and robot learning. His research focuses on enabling robots to perceive, understand, and physically interact with humans in natural and meaningful ways — from exchanging objects to offering comfort through touch. Christen's most influential contribution is pioneering vision-based human-to-robot handovers, with his 2023 framework for learning control policies directly from point clouds garnering 42 citations and representing the first of its kind in the field. Complementing this, his 2024 work on synthesizing hand-object motions (SynH2R) addresses the critical challenge of training data scarcity in simulation-to-real transfer. His 2020 research on 6D pose estimation for robotic assembly tasks (34 citations) demonstrates his strong grounding in robotic manipulation and unstructured environments. Perhaps his most distinctive contribution is the "Six Hug Commandments" (32 citations), a principled framework for designing a human-sized hugging robot with visual and haptic perception — a remarkably human-centered achievement that underscores his commitment to socially aware robotics. His work on hierarchical reinforcement learning further highlights his breadth across both planning and low-level robot control.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Learning Human-to-Robot Handovers from Point Clouds42 citations · 2023
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7Learning Human-to-Robot Handovers from Point Clouds3 citations · 2023
- 8FunGrasp: Functional Grasping for Diverse Dexterous Hands2 citations · 2025