Embodiment & Hardware
I develop robotic hands and tactile hardware as part of a holistic approach to robot design, where morphology, sensing, and learning are tightly coupled rather than treated as separate layers. In line with embodied and developmental robotics, this pillar focuses on how hand structure, tactile sensors, and physical embodiment shape what robots can perceive and how they can act in complex real-world environments. My goal is to enable dexterous, robust, and adaptive manipulation through hardware that is not only functional, but also informative, scalable, and suitable for deployment in industrial and assistive settings.
A central challenge is designing tactile hardware that remains robust, compact, and informative across different tasks, contact conditions, and sensing modalities. Current directions include biomimetic and vision-based tactile sensors, sensor-agnostic representations, and hand morphologies that support both perception and manipulation without over-specializing to a single benchmark. I am especially interested in how hardware design can better support transferable learning, safer physical interaction, and knowledge-intensive R&D collaborations that bridge lab prototypes with practical robotic systems.
Related Projects
Featured Publications:
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PEBRE: An Open-Hardware Compute and Perception Add-On for the Pepper Robot
arXiv. 2026. Kuhlmann, Malte; Bugueno-Cordova, Ignacio; Alms, Emil; Ruiz-del-Solar, Javier; Navarro-Guerrero, Nicolás
DOI, PDF, URL, bib file. bibkey: Kuhlmann2026PEBRE Supplementary material ©2026 The Authors. -
Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands? A Summary of a Comparison of Human and Robotic Hands
IJCAI Workshop on AI-Based Humanoid Robot Design and Control Through the Lens of HRI, Evolution, and Biomechanics. pp. 2. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Aug 2026. Zai El Amri, Wadhah; Fabisch, Alexander; Singh, Chandandeep; Navarro-Guerrero, Nicolás
URL, bib file. bibkey: ZaiElAmri2026Robots ©2026 The Authors. -
Optimizing Robotic Hand Morphology for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation
IJCAI Workshop on AI-Based Humanoid Robot Design and Control Through the Lens of HRI, Evolution, and Biomechanics. pp. 2. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Aug 2026. Zai El Amri, Wadhah; Yang, Xie; Navarro-Guerrero, Nicolás
URL, bib file. bibkey: ZaiElAmri2026Optimizing ©2026 The Authors. -
Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands? A Comparison of Human and Robotic Hands
arXiv. May 2026. Fabisch, Alexander; Zai El Amri, Wadhah; Singh, Chandandeep; Navarro-Guerrero, Nicolás
DOI, PDF, URL, bibkey: Fabisch2026Robots Supplementary material ©2026 The Authors. -
A Biomimetic Fingerprint for Robotic Tactile Sensing
International Symposium on Robotics (ISR Europe). pp. 112-118. Stuttgart, Germany. Sep 2023. Juiña Quilachamín, Oscar Alberto; Navarro-Guerrero, Nicolás
DOI, PDF, URL, bib file. bibkey: JuinaQuilachamin2023Fingerprint Supplementary material ©2023 The Authors. -
NICO – Neuro-Inspired COmpanion: A Developmental Humanoid Robot Platform for Multimodal Interaction
IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). pp. 113-120. Lisbon, Portugal. Aug 2017. Kerzel, Matthias; Strahl, Erik; Magg, Sven; Navarro-Guerrero, Nicolás; Heinrich, Stefan; Wermter, Stefan
DOI, PDF, URL, bib file. bibkey: Kerzel2017NICO