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About

I am a Research Scientist with the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) (since September 2025).

My journey to robotics was not linear. In a previous life, I was a farmer and goat herder in a small village on the banks of the Blue Nile in Sudan, living without access to electricity. Somehow I ended up earning a Ph.D. (cum laude) from Sapienza University of Rome and University of Paris Saclay, and serving as a Postdoc at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) where I worked on avatar systems with Honda R&D, as well as certifiably robust legged robots locomotion controllers.

Research Interests

My work sits at the intersection of Control Theory and Applied Robotics, aiming to guarantee desireable control-theoretic properties and performance across different domains.

  • Predictive Control: I worked on both model-based and data-driven approaches. I have designed optimization-based controllers for bipedal and quadrupedal robots (Non-linear Centroidal MPC with stability certificates) and recently extended this to data-fused strategies for flying humanoids.

  • Human-Robot Interaction: I worked on robot teleoperation (where my initial work on iCub matured -thanks to others- into the iCub3 avatar system featured in Science Robotics) and contributed to human-aware planners for ergonomic collaboration (earning IEEE RAS prizes and ICRA finalist nominations). Recently I designed vision based collaborative footstep planners for humanoid-human collaborative payload carrying.

  • Nonlinear Digial and Geometric Control: My Ph.D. thesis revolved around ontrollers requiring partial dynamics cancellation and their implementation in discrete time. This required understanding the effect of sampling and holding the control (digital implementation) on the resulting structure of the closed loop system, as well as the possibility of applying those controller synthesis methods to problems that can be cast as sets stabilization problems e.g. path following and periodic orbits stabilization.

  • Field & Marine Robotics: In my current role, I am learning about and developing control architectures for underwater towed vehicles, ROVs, and agricultural manipulators, tackling the challenges of unstructured and field environments.

Feel free to reach out for collaborations regarding control theory applications in robotics!