Simone Pantanetti is a PhD student at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) in Ancona, Italy. Before starting his doctoral research, he worked as a mechanical designer in industry — an experience that shaped his hands-on approach to engineering problems. Today, his research sits at the intersection of motion planning and collaborative robotics, with a focus on obstacle avoidance algorithms for mobile manipulators. Since late 2025, he has been based in Hannover as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Assembly Technology and Robotics (match) at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), where a six-month research stay is giving his work a new dimension.
Two arms, one object and a sense of touch
Shortly after his arrival at match, Simone Pantanetti was invited by Tobias Recker to join an ongoing bilateral teleoperation project. The setup is as elegant as it is complex: two master robots, controlled by a human operator through admittance control, teleoperate two slave robots that work together to manipulate an object. What makes the system particularly interesting is the haptic feedback loop — forces detected on the slave side are transmitted back to the master, allowing the operator to physically feel what the robots are touching.
“The haptic loop is what makes teleoperation feel natural,” Simone Pantanetti explains. “Without force feedback, you’re essentially flying blind — with it, you can sense resistance, adjust your grip, and react in real time.”
After several weeks of development, the system is now capable of handling both translational and rotational movements simultaneously, with both arms working in concert. The next step is equally ambitious: recording manipulation data during box-rotation tasks and using it to train a neural network that can eventually perform the task autonomously — a behavioral cloning approach that bridges teleoperation and autonomous robotics.
Beyond teleoperation: obstacle avoidance in practice
Alongside the teleoperation project, Simone Pantanetti has also been dedicating part of his time at match to advancing his PhD research on obstacle avoidance for collaborative mobile manipulators. The core challenge of his work is keeping the end-effector on its intended trajectory — precisely and at constant speed — while allowing the rest of the robot arm to reconfigure freely in order to avoid any obstacles it may encounter along the way. Decoupling these two objectives is what makes the problem both technically demanding and practically relevant.
To ground the work in a concrete scenario, he plans to integrate his algorithms into a simulation of the 3D wall-printing process performed at the institute — a task with strict trajectory requirements that serves as a meaningful testbed.
Science as a two-way exchange
For Simone Pantanetti, the stay at match has been more than a productive research period. His background — first as a mechanical designer in industry, then as a researcher — has always pushed him toward the practical side of engineering. “I need to see things work,” he admits. “Building a system, running it, and watching it do what it’s supposed to do is what drives me.” That mindset has found fertile ground at match, where both projects have demanded real, running implementations rather than purely theoretical results.
The match team has welcomed the exchange and looks forward to seeing the results of both research threads develop in the months ahead.
