Wenceslao Shaw Cortez
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Melbourne, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Papers
13
Total Citations
138
H-Index
6
About
Wenceslao Shaw Cortez is a robotics and control systems researcher whose work spans safety-critical control, robotic manipulation, and human-robot cooperation. His research tackles some of the most demanding challenges in modern robotics: enabling robotic hands to manipulate unknown objects using only onboard tactile sensing — a paradigm he terms "tactile-based blind grasping" — and developing mathematically rigorous frameworks for ensuring robots operate safely under real-world constraints. His most cited work, "Safe-by-design control for Euler–Lagrange systems" (2022, 33 citations), advances zeroing control barrier functions for a broad class of mechanical systems, providing formal safety guarantees directly relevant to physical robots. His tactile grasping research (30 citations) demonstrated robust object manipulation without prior object knowledge, with clear implications for prosthetics and dexterous robotic hands. More recently, his distributed, event-triggered adaptive controller for cooperative manipulation (23 citations) pushed boundaries by exploiting rolling contacts rather than assuming rigid ones. Shaw Cortez also contributes to human-robot co-adaptation and formal task planning using temporal logic, reflecting a commitment to holistic, human-centered robotic systems. With foundational contributions across discrete-time control, barrier functions, and collaborative robotics, his growing body of work positions him as an emerging voice in next-generation autonomous manipulation and safe robot design.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Safe-by-design control for Euler–Lagrange systems33 citations · 2022
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- 4Co-adaptive Human–Robot Cooperation: Summary and Challenges16 citations · 2021
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