Alessandro De Luca was born in Roma, Italy, on October 11, 1957. He received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering and the Research Doctorate degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Roma “La Sapienza” in 1982 and 1987, respectively. From 1988 to 1992 he was a Researcher at the School of Engineering of the University of Roma “La Sapienza”. He was then an Associate Professor of Automatic Control in the Department of Information Sciences at the University of Milano from 1992 to 1993, and in the Department of Computer and System Science (DIS, renamed DIAG since 2011) at the University of Roma “La Sapienza” from 1993 to 2000. Since 2000, he is a Full Professor of Robotics at the University of Roma “La Sapienza” where he has been the scienti fi c responsible of the DIS Robotics Laboratory until April 2005. From September 1985 to May 1986, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Robotics and Automation Lab of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. From September 2005 to April 2006, he visited the Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics at DLR in Oberpfa ff enhofen, Germany. His research interests include modeling, motion planning, and control of fl exible manipulators, kinematically redundant manipulators, underactuated robots, wheeled mobile robots and mobile manipulators; hybrid force-velocity control; nonlinear control of nonholonomic mechanical systems; iterative learning; fault detection and isolation; visual servoing; physical human-robot interaction. Under his lead, projects of the Robotics group at DIS have been funded with many national and european research grants. He has published more than 170 journal and conference papers and book chapters. He is coeditor of the book Advances in Control of Articulated and Mobile Robots (Springer, 2004) and one of the authors of the awarded Springer Handbook of Robotics (2008). For the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, he served as Associate Editor from 1994 to 1998, as Editor from 1998 to 2003, and as Editor-in-Chief from 2003 to 2004. He has been the Editor-in-Chief of the renamed IEEE Transactions on Robotics since its birth in 2004 until September 2008. In 2005, he received the German Helmholtz Humboldt Research Award for foreign scientists. Between 2006 and 2012, he has been a member of the Search Committee for Physical Sciences (former Technical Sciences) of the K¨orber European Science Award, granted by the K¨orber Foundation. He has served as a program committee member for numerous international conferences. He was General Chair of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Rome in April 2007. He has been a member of the RAS AdCom (2008–2010) and serves as RAS Vice-President for Publication Activities in 2012–13. In 2009, he received the IEEE-RAS Distinguished Service Award. Since 2009, he is Chair of Panel PE7 (Systems and Communication Engineering) of the European Research Council for the Advanced Grant evaluation. He is an IEEE Fellow (class of 2007). He is the coordinator of the European FP7 project ICT-287513 SAPHARI (2011-15).
