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About

Tommaso Pardi is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of robotic manipulation, grasp planning, and human-robot interaction. With a body of research accumulating over 160 citations, Pardi has made meaningful contributions to some of the most practically challenging problems in modern robotics. His most recognized contribution, "Benchmarking Protocol for Grasp Planning Algorithms" (2019, 41 citations), addresses the longstanding difficulty of fairly comparing grasp planning methods across known and unknown objects — a foundational problem as the field rapidly evolves. Complementing this, his work on task-aware grasping and post-grasp manipulation demonstrates a sophisticated understanding that a robot's grasp must anticipate what comes next, whether opening a door or handing an object to a human. Pardi has devoted particular attention to robot-human object handovers, exploring how a robot passer's grasp strategy shapes both performance and perceived interaction quality. His 2021 review of handover literature further cements his role as a synthesizer in this growing subfield. His motion planning research — enabling robots to navigate arbitrary surfaces using only noisy point cloud data while maximizing manipulability — reveals an equally strong grounding in constrained trajectory planning. Across these threads, Pardi's work consistently bridges perception, planning, and human-centered design.