Skip to content

Dr. Franco N Piñan Basualdo

Postdoctoral researcher, Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics (RAM), KU Leuven

Franco N. P. B.

Franco N. Piñan Basualdo received his M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Instituto Balseiro, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Argentina, in 2018. He earned a joint Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences and Technology from Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and in Automation from Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, France, in 2022. As part of his doctoral training, he was a visiting researcher at the Physical Intelligence Department of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2021. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Surgical Robotics Lab at University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands from 2022 to 2024 He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Soft Robotics Group at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on small-scale robotics, developing non-contact actuation methods, control strategies, and collective microrobotic systems that leverage both inter-agent and environmental interactions.

Research interests

  • Microrobotics: Development of small-scale robotic agents using non-contact actuation strategies for manipulation and control.

  • Collective systems: Study of multi-agent coordination through inter-agent interactions and emergent collective behavior.

  • Physical Intelligence: Leveraging physical interactions between robotic agents and their environment to enable efficient, adaptive behavior and minimal control architectures.

See projects for more details.

Experience