Francesco Vigni
Robotics & AI Engineer (Ph.D.)
I build reliable autonomous systems at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and production-grade ML. Background in human-robot interaction, with experience from Disney Research, TU Munich, Roboception, and a Ph.D. from University of Naples.
Specializing in perception pipelines, ROS/ROS2, edge AI deployment, and full-stack engineering.
What I Do
Robotics & HRI
ROS/ROS2, SLAM, MoveIt, sensor fusion, social robots (Pepper, TIAGo, ARI).
Machine Learning & CV
PyTorch, YOLO, object detection & tracking, neural style transfer, edge AI on NVIDIA Jetson.
Software & DevOps
Python, C++, TypeScript, FastAPI, Docker, CI/CD. From prototyping to production.
Experience
Education
Milestones
Won 1st prize at the 2nd Startup Creation Lab — Università di Bologna, hosted at Laboratorio Aperto Forlì.
Launched updated portfolio showcasing recent projects, ML demos, and interests.
Joined the Ordine degli Ingegneri (Forlì-Cesena) — Sector A, Information Engineering.
Defended Ph.D. thesis "The Unscripted Encounter: Social Cues for Spontaneous Human-Robot Interactions" — Doctor Europæus label, University of Naples Federico II.
Joined the Young Leaders Committee of ICSR25+AI (Naples, Sep 2025).
Proceedings of the ALTRUIST, BAILAR, SCRITA, and WARN 2024 workshops published online.
Paper accepted at IEEE RO-MAN 2024 (Pasadena): emotion-based social distances for robot path planning.