Biography
Antonio Franchi is a Tenured Researcher of CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He has been based at LAAS-CNRS (RIS team) in Toulouse, France, since 2014. From 2010 to 2013 he was a Research Scientist and then a Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany, and the scientific leader of the group ‘Autonomous Robotics and Human-Machine Systems’. His main research interests in robotics are motion control, estimation, hardware design, and human-machine systems. His main areas of expertise are aerial robotics and multi-robot systems. He published about 130 articles in international journals, conferences, and books, and in 2010 he was awarded with the ‘IEEE RAS ICYA Best Paper Award’ for one of his works on Multi-robot Exploration. He is a IEEE Senior Member and associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (2013 to 2016), IEEE ICRA (2014 to 2019), IEEE/RSJ IROS (2014 to 2018) and the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine (2015). He is currently coordinator of the ANR MuRoPhen project (2018-2021), the CNRS PI of the AEROARMS EU H2020 project (2015-2019), coordinator of the MBZIRC 2020 LAAS team project (2018-2020), and co-coordinator of the FlyCrane Occitanie Pre-Maturation project (2019-2020). He has also a prominent role in the ANR Flying Co-Worker project (2019-2022) and the PRO-ACT EU H2020 project (2019-2021). In the past, he also participated to the ARCAS EU FP7 (2014-2010) project. He is a co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Multi-Robot systems, which he co-founded in 2014, and was the recipient of the IEEE RAS most active TC award 2018. He co-funded and was the program co-chair of the IEEE-sponsored International Symposium on Multi-robot and Multi-agent Systems (MRS 2017, MRS 2019).