Thiago Santini

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About

Thiago Santini is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction, with a primary focus on shared autonomy and gaze-based robotics. His work centers on developing robotic systems that can seamlessly collaborate with humans by understanding and predicting user intent. Santini’s major contribution lies in characterizing eye-hand behavior to enhance shared manipulation systems, enabling robots to assist people with activities of daily living more effectively. His most-cited paper, "Eye-Hand Behavior in Human-Robot Shared Manipulation" (2018, 68 citations), demonstrates how analyzing user gaze and joystick input can improve intention recognition in assistive robotic arms. In his subsequent work, "Distilling Location Proposals of Unknown Objects through Gaze Information for Human-Robot Interaction" (2020, 12 citations), Santini tackles the challenge of enabling robots to interact with novel objects by leveraging human gaze cues. This approach allows robots to infer which objects are relevant for interaction without requiring pre-programmed knowledge, a critical step toward deploying robots in unstructured, real-world environments. Santini’s research bridges cognitive science and robotics, offering practical pathways for more intuitive and adaptive human-robot collaboration.