Francesco Del Duchetto

3118 Isaac Newton building

Brayford Pool

Lincoln LN6 7TS, UK

I am a Lecturer (Asst. Prof.) in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems at the University of Lincoln UK and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). I am also a member of Interaction Lab and Autism Research and Innovation Centre.

The aims of my research are endowing robots with the capabilities to operate autonomously in everyday human environments and to interact with people in a socially appropriate fashion. To this end, I develop methodologies for robot learning from human feedback, for enabling and studying social perception in human-robot interactions, and for assuring robot autonomy.

I am actively involved in robotics competitions for the advancement of the state-of-the-art in robotics and AI, and for introducing students to research topics in these fields. In 2023 I founded the LCASTOR team, which participates annually to RoboCup @HOME competitions.

Before, I was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate working in the TARICS project, and a PhD student advised by Prof. Marc Hanheide in the “Lindsey, the tour guide robot” project. I graduated from Sapienza University of Rome with a MSc in “Artificial Intelligence and Robotics” advised by Prof. Luca Iocchi and from the University of Bologna with a BSc in “Computer Science and Engineering” advised by Prof. Andrea Roli.

Research interests: Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Robotics, Interactive Machine Learning, AI, Long-Term Autonomy

latest news

Sep 3, 2024	I have been invited as a Panelist at the Future Perspectives event at the Lincoln Art Centre !
Sep 27, 2023	I have been invited as a Panel Speaker at the AI + Creativity \| Innovation + Inclusion. AI Fringe event at the Lincoln Museum for a roundtable discussion on the use of AI and robotics technologies in the cultural domain for enabling inclusion. !
Jul 8, 2022	Our RA-L paper was accepted to be presented at IROS 2022 in Kyoto Japan and nominated as a finalist for the Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics 🏅!
Apr 25, 2022	We got a paper accepted for publication at the IEEE RA-L reporting our latest research on behavioural adaptation from the users feedback during human-robot interactions! Available at: <a href=https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10518>https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10518</a>
Oct 28, 2021	I will present at IROS 2021 our work Navigate-and-Seek: a Robotics Framework for People Localisation in Agricultural Environments done while working with L-CAS and Saga robotics!

selected publications

RAL

Do not make the same mistakes again and again: Learning local recovery policies for navigation from human demonstrations

Francesco Del Duchetto, Ayse Kucukyilmaz, Luca Iocchi, and 1 more author

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2018

Bib Code

@article{del2018not,
  title = {Do not make the same mistakes again and again: Learning local recovery policies for navigation from human demonstrations},
  author = {Del Duchetto, Francesco and Kucukyilmaz, Ayse and Iocchi, Luca and Hanheide, Marc},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume = {3},
  number = {4},
  pages = {4084--4091},
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {IEEE},
}

Lindsey the Tour Guide Robot-Usage Patterns in a Museum Long-Term Deployment

Francesco Del Duchetto, Paul Baxter, and Marc Hanheide

In IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2019

Bib

@inproceedings{del2019lindsey,
  title = {Lindsey the Tour Guide Robot-Usage Patterns in a Museum Long-Term Deployment},
  author = {Del Duchetto, Francesco and Baxter, Paul and Hanheide, Marc},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robot \& Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)},
  year = {2019},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

FRobAI

Are You Still With Me? Continuous Engagement Assessment From a Robot’s Point of View

Francesco Del Duchetto, Paul Baxter, and Marc Hanheide

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2020

Bib Code

@article{del2020you,
  title = {Are You Still With Me? Continuous Engagement Assessment From a Robot's Point of View},
  author = {Del Duchetto, Francesco and Baxter, Paul and Hanheide, Marc},
  journal = {Frontiers in Robotics and AI},
  volume = {7},
  number = {116},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Frontiers Media SA},
}

RAL

Learning on the Job: Long-Term Behavioural Adaptation in Human-Robot Interactions

Francesco Del Duchetto, and Marc Hanheide

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2022

🏅 Bib

@article{del2022learning,
  title = {Learning on the Job: Long-Term Behavioural Adaptation in Human-Robot Interactions},
  author = {Del Duchetto, Francesco and Hanheide, Marc},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume = {7},
  number = {3},
  pages = {6934--6941},
  year = {2022},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  award = {Finalist for IROS 2022 Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics by KROS}
}