Guillem Alenyà Ribas

Guillem Alenyà Ribas is a Researcher and Director of the Perception and Manipulation group at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona. His research focuses on integrating robots into human environments, particularly in assistive robotics and the manipulation of deformable objects such as garments.

His research interests span Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), assistive robotics, explainable AI, robot personalization, deformable object manipulation, and benchmarking. He aims to make robots more transparent, adaptive, and safe in real-world applications. His work combines AI planning, vision, learning from demonstration, and user-centered design to develop systems that can assist in healthcare, domestic, and industrial settings.

Recent publications reveal a strong trend in explainability and personalization in HRI, with a focus on frailty assessment in elderly care, real-time explanations, and counterfactual reasoning. His team also advances benchmarking in cloth manipulation, 3D reconstruction of clothed humans, and ontology-based reasoning for robot plans. This reflects a multidisciplinary approach combining robotics, AI, and social sciences.

• Coordinator of ROB-IN, CLOE-GRAPH, and BURG projects
• Principal Investigator in SeCuRoPS and DEMETER 5.0
• Former coordinator of SIMBIOTS, HuMoUR, and SOCRATES

He has supervised numerous PhD students, many of whom have received prestigious awards such as the Georges Giralt PhD Award and the AIHUB.CSIC Prize. His leadership in technology transfer and European projects highlights his role in bridging academic research with real-world applications.

He leads the Perception and Manipulation group at IRI, fostering collaboration across disciplines and mentoring a large team of researchers, PhD students, and technical staff. The group actively contributes to open science through standardized datasets and reproducible methodologies.