Bernardo Aceituno - Cabeza

Bernardo is a PhD student in mechanical engineering whose research examines the synthesis of robust strategies for grasping and dexterous manipulation. Specifically, he is examining the problem of caging, a geometric property by which a set of fingers manipulate an object by trapping it rather than immobilizing it. He has developed an explicit optimization approach to formulate the caging condition as a convex mixed-integer optimization problem. This was the first of its kind, since caging had previously been approached as either a topological or computational geometry problem. More recently, he has extended the formulation to synthesizing grasping strategies with certificates of correctness, a problem that is of high interest today both in academia and industry. He uses MATLAB’s Robotics Toolbox, Optimization Toolbox, and Deep Learning Toolbox as the main prototyping interface. In addition, his work has resulted in several tools that have been made open to the robotics and MathWorks communities, including ABB ROS Interface, Contact-TrajectoryOptimization Models, and Certified Grasping Toolbox. Bernando earned a BSc in electronics engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela