About Rafael Papallas

I am a Research Fellow in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds. My research interest is in robotic manipulation, manipulation planning, motion planning and motion control. I received my PhD from the School of Computing, University of Leeds.

I envision a future where robots co-exist with humans in dynamic environments to empower and improve the quality of their lives. For example, consider a robot at home assisting a motor-impaired person with daily tasks like the one in the figure above. The robot needs to retrieve the orange juice bottle from the back of a cluttered fridge. Other obstacles, at the front of the fridge, prevent the robot from directly reaching and grasping the orange juice bottle successfully. The robot needs to find a plan to manipulate those objects, perhaps by safely pushing them away, to create the required space to reach and grasp the orange juice bottle.

My research deals with such challenging problems where a robot needs to interact with movable objects in cluttered and dynamic environments while reasoning about their dynamics. In particular, I am interested in developing motion planning and control algorithms for non-prehensile physics-based manipulation in clutter. This is a particularly challenging problem today in Robotics. We don’t have robots that can achieve such manipulation effectively in highly cluttered environments like a fridge or a warehouse shelf.