Giulio Romualdi, Ph.D. — Robotics Technical Lead & Product Owner at Generative Bionics
📍 Genoa, Italy · 📧 giulio.romualdi@gmail.com
Professional Summary
I turn advanced humanoid robotics research into working robotic products. As Robotics Technical Lead and Product Owner at Generative Bionics, I lead the development and delivery of locomotion and whole-body control technologies for humanoid robots — owning the technical roadmap, priorities, backlog and delivery criteria, driving technical decision-making, and mentoring engineers and researchers. Alongside my leadership responsibilities I stay hands-on across the full locomotion stack, from reinforcement-learning policy design and motion generation to simulation, deployment, experimental testing and on-robot tuning. My background combines deep robotics research — nonlinear and model predictive control, optimization, whole-body control and learning — with delivery on real humanoid platforms including iCub, iCub3, ergoCub and GENE.01.
Experience
- January 2026 – Present
🚀 Technical Lead – Locomotion Control — Generative Bionics
Functional responsibility: Product Owner – Locomotion Team
I lead the development and delivery of locomotion and whole-body control technologies for humanoid robots. In this role I:- translate quarterly objectives agreed with the CTO and system architects into technical roadmaps, priorities, backlog, milestones, Definition of Done and acceptance criteria;
- technically lead a multidisciplinary team of engineers, PhDs and researchers, driving technical decision-making for the locomotion and whole-body control subsystem and resolving technical disagreements;
- mentor team members, give technical feedback, and organize and run technical hiring interviews and candidate evaluations;
- lead cross-functional coordination with the mechanical and system teams — including simulation results and technical input for future humanoid platforms — and report progress, trade-offs and delivery status to leadership;
- own the technical pipeline end to end: RL policy design, motion generation, simulation, sim-to-sim validation, deployment on physical humanoids, experimental testing and on-robot tuning.
- September 2022 – January 2026
🔬 Postdoctoral Researcher — Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence
Coordinated the technical activities of the Robust, Reactive and Dynamic Locomotion group (Scrum Master, 2023–2025), supporting up to nine researchers, and mentored PhD students and researchers on research ideas, experiment design, code review, software development and scientific writing. Contributed to locomotion architectures for iCub, iCub3 and ergoCub. Served as IIT technical point of contact for the ergoCub project (IIT–INAIL collaboration), organizing monthly meetings with INAIL and presenting overall development status and progress.
🏆 ergoCub robot featured walking on national Italian television. - November 2018 – August 2022
🎓 PhD Researcher — Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
Online humanoid locomotion: nonlinear model predictive control with step adjustment, optimal control, whole-body control and optimization, validated experimentally on iCub and iCub3. Contributed the integration of locomotion with the teleoperation system used in the iCub3 avatar and ANA Avatar XPRIZE activities. - December 2017 – October 2018
🧪 Research Fellow & Guest Student — Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
Developed and experimentally validated capture-point and DCM-based walking controllers for iCub, starting from the M.Sc. thesis and continuing into the PhD.
Education
- 2018 – 2022
🎓 PhD in Mechatronics, Robotics and Automation Engineering — University of Genoa / Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia · Grade: Excellent
Thesis: Online Control of Humanoid Robot Locomotion. Focus on humanoid locomotion, nonlinear control, model predictive and optimal control, optimization and whole-body robotics, with experimental validation on iCub and iCub3 and within the ANA Avatar XPRIZE activities (locomotion + teleoperation integration). - October 2021 – December 2021
🌍 Visiting PhD Student — LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse
Whole-body control and state estimation for humanoid robots with structural/link flexibility (TALOS). Led to the first-author paper Whole-Body Control and Estimation of Humanoid Robots with Link Flexibility (IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2022). - 2015 – 2018
📘 M.Sc. in Robotics and Automation Engineering — University of Pisa · 110/110 cum Laude
Thesis: Capture-Point Based Controllers for Robot Bipedal Locomotion: Analysis and Implementation on the iCub Platform. - 2011 – 2014
📗 B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering — University of Pisa · 110/110
Professional Service & Recognition
- 🗂 Organizing committee — Designing Interactive Humanoids: Learning Tasks through Interaction with Humans, IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2024
- 🏅 Finalist – Best Oral Presentation Award, IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2024 — Online DNN-driven Nonlinear MPC for Stylistic Humanoid Robot Walking with Step Adjustment (details)
- 🤖 ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finalist – iCub Team — contributed the integration of humanoid locomotion with the teleoperation system used in the iCub3 avatar activities (team achievement)
- 🥈 Runner-up Best Poster Award — ADHERENT, NAVER LABS Europe AI for Robotics Workshop, 2021 (co-author, team recognition)
- 🏅 Finalist – Best Interactive Presentation, I-RIM 2019 — Online Trajectory Generation for Step Recovery in Bipedal Robot Locomotion
Selected Publications
- 2026: Towards Shared Embodied Intelligence in Humanoid Robots through Optimization, Development and Testing of the Human-Aware ergoCub Robot
📰 Journal: Nature Machine Intelligence - 2024: Online DNN-driven Nonlinear MPC for Stylistic Humanoid Robot Walking with Step Adjustment
📚 Conference: IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robotics (Humanoids)
Paper, Website, Project page - 2024: [Workshop] Designing Interactive Humanoids: Learning Tasks through Interaction with Humans
🗂 Conference: IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robotics (Humanoids)
Workshop Website - 2024: iCub3 Avatar System: Enabling Remote Fully Immersive Embodiment of Humanoid Robots
📰 Journal: Science Robotics
Paper - 2022: Whole-Body Control and Estimation of Humanoid Robots with Link Flexibility
📖 Conference: IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robotics (Humanoids)
Paper - 2022: Dynamic Complementarity Conditions and Whole-Body Trajectory Optimization for Humanoid Robot Locomotion
📖 Journal: IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
Paper - 2022: Online Non-linear Centroidal MPC for Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Step Adjustment
📚 Conference: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Paper, GitHub - 2022: ADHERENT: Learning Human-like Trajectory Generators for Whole-body Control of Humanoid Robots
📰 Journal: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Paper - 2021: Modeling of Visco-Elastic Environments for Humanoid Robot Motion Control
📚 Journal: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Paper, GitHub - 2019: A Benchmarking of DCM Based Architectures for Position, Velocity and Torque Controlled Humanoid Robots
📖 Journal: International Journal of Humanoid Robotics
Paper, GitHub
📚 For the complete list of publications, visit my Google Scholar profile.
Skills & Competencies
- Leadership & Product: 🧭 Technical leadership, product ownership, roadmap & backlog management, Definition of Done and acceptance criteria, technical decision-making, mentoring, technical hiring, cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder reporting
- Robotics: 🤖 Humanoid locomotion, whole-body control, model predictive & nonlinear control, optimal control, optimization, state estimation, reinforcement learning for locomotion, simulation and sim-to-real deployment
- Software: 💻 C++, Python, MATLAB, PyTorch, Isaac Lab, Eigen3, iDynTree, osqp, IPOPT, CasADi, Qt, YARP, ROS2, Git, CMake
Professional Qualification
- 🎖️ Qualification to practise as an Engineer — Section A, Industrial Engineering Sector, State Examination at the University of Pisa (Second Session 2020, published February 2021).
- 🛩️ RPAS (drone) pilot — practical training certificate, ENAC (2016).
Languages
- 🇮🇹 Italian — Native / bilingual proficiency
- 🇬🇧 English — Full professional proficiency
- 🇯🇵 Japanese — Elementary proficiency
Open-Source Software Maintainer
- Bipedal Locomotion Framework — suite of libraries for whole-body control and locomotion of humanoid robots: GitHub
- osqp-eigen — C++ Eigen wrapper for the OSQP quadratic-programming solver: GitHub
- walking-controllers — DCM-based walking controllers for humanoid robots: GitHub
- AMP-RSL-RL — Adversarial Motion Priors for reinforcement-learning-based locomotion: GitHub
- lie-group-controllers — header-only C++ controllers designed on Lie groups: GitHub
- robot-log-visualizer — visualizer for data logged on real robots: GitHub