Giacomo Spigler
I am a tenured assistant professor at Tilburg University and co-director of the AI for Robotics Lab (AIR-Lab).
I work on active perception and imitation learning for humanoid robots, with a background in deep reinforcement learning, simulation, and robot hardware.
- TAVIS (2026). A benchmark for active vision in imitation learning, where the policy also decides where the robot looks. Two humanoid torsos in IsaacLab, 2,200 teleoperated demonstrations, Diffusion Policy and π0 baselines, and a metric to measure gaze-hand anticipation. arXiv · code · data and checkpoints
- POUCH (2026). An object-centric memory for visuomotor policies that tracks objects through occlusion, including objects moving inside containers, and conditions a Diffusion Policy on them. Evaluated in simulation and on Reachy 2, with the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. code
- Reachy 2 at AIR-Lab. Our humanoid platform, with a Quest 3 teleoperation interface that records directly into LeRobot datasets, on the real robot and in simulation. A variant of the same code collected the TAVIS demonstrations. code · video
- Proximal Policy Distillation (TMLR 2025). Policy distillation for PPO-style agents, with an implementation for Stable-Baselines3. paper · code
- Tilburg Hand. A low-cost dexterous robot hand I designed and built, presented at the ICRA 2023 workshop on open-source manipulation ecosystems. Tilburg Robotics
- Flatland-RL. Co-author of the multi-agent RL benchmark for train scheduling used in the NeurIPS 2020 Flatland competition, built at AIcrowd with SBB. arXiv
- (January 2022 - current) Tenured Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Intelligent Systems of Tilburg University.
Co-director of the AI for Robotics Lab (AIR-Lab) and of the MindLabs Robotics & Avatars Lab. - Research fellow at SIKS; mentor at LeadTheFuture.
- Building the ChatGPT of Robotics Requires Physical Intelligence, plenary talk at the International Conference of Physics Students (ICPS), Rabat, Morocco. August 2026.
- Deep Reinforcement Learning in Robotics: Bridging the Gap between Simulation and Real-world Applications, "Contributions to Control Systems" seminar series, Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. May 2024.
- AI revolution & Robotics: towards highly-autonomous agricultural robots, symposium "Agricultural Resources, Leadership and Artificial Intelligence", Italian Embassy, Den Haag, The Netherlands. October 2023.
- End-to-end robot learning and the Tilburg Hand, TAISIG Talks 15, Tilburg, The Netherlands (video). August 2022.