Ugo Pattacini was born in Foggia in 1977. He graduated in Electronic Engineering (cum laude) at University of Pisa in 2001, with a thesis on the design and realization of an optic-fiber micromachined accelerometer with integrated light sensor. In the period between 2001 and 2003 he worked at Racing Department of Magneti Marelli in Corbetta (Milan) as SW developer for Formula 1 applications, dealing with the design and the implementation of integrated telemetry drivers and proprietary hard-constrained real-time operating systems for electronic control units of Toyota, Renault and Ferrari F1 cars. In 2004 he joined Toyota F1 team in Cologne, playing active role in the embedded software development of TF104, TF105 and TF106 car projects, focusing his activities on the vehicle dynamics and torque-based traction control strategies. In 2006 he moved to the Earth Observation Business Unit of Thales Alenia Space in Rome where he was concerned as PDHT system engineer with specifications design and trade-off analyses of the satellite data acquisition sub-system for COSMO-SkyMed (ASI) and GMES (ESA) scientific programs.

Currently, he has a PhD position at Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) on the study and synthesis of a modular adaptive controller based on motion primitives for a humanoid robotic platform.

Ugo Pattacini has a deep background in control of dynamical systems, real-time software programming of complex distributed architectures and model-based development techniques with automatic code generation through fast-prototyping packages (e.g. Simulink/RT Workshop Embedded Coder, DSPACE Targetlink).

Gay S., Degallier S., Pattacini U., Ijspeert A. & Victor J.S. 2010, ‘Integration of Vision and Central Pattern Generator Based Locomotion for Path Planning of a Nonholonomic Crawling Humanoid Robot’,  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Taipei, Taiwan, October 18-22, 2010.

Lallee S., Metta G., Natale L., Pattacini U. & Dominey P.F. 2009, ‘Proprioception of the hand contributes to visual recognition speed and accuracy: Evidence from the Multi-Modal Convergence Map model of Parietal Cortex Area 5’,  Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Chicago, USA, October 17-21, 2009.

Pattacini U., Nori F., Natale L., Metta G. & Sandini G. 2010, ‘An Experimental Evaluation of a Novel Minimum-Jerk Cartesian Controller for Humanoid Robots’,  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Taipei, Taiwan, October 18-22, 2010.

RobotCub: ROBotic Open-architecture Technology for Cognition, Understanding and Behavior (EC-FP6). The main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot with the size of a 3.5 year old child: the iCub. The project is meant to be open in many different ways: the platform is distributed openly, so as the software, and the project is open to including partners forming collaboration worldwide.

CHRIS: Cooperative Human Robot Interaction Systems (EC-FP7). The CHRIS project addresses the fundamental issues which would enable safe Human Robot Interaction (HRI).