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csferrazza@berkeley.edu

Carmelo Sferrazza

Assistant Professor

Department Research Areas

Computational Engineering
Robotics and Intelligent Mechanical Systems

Joining January 2026

https://sferrazza.cc 

Carmelo (Carlo) Sferrazza is an incoming Assistant Professor at UT Austin. Until recently, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley with Prof. Pieter Abbeel. His research focuses on advancing humanoid robots’ intelligence and loco-manipulation capabilities by incorporating priors, inductive biases, and multi-sensory feedback. He earned his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Raffaello D’Andrea, where he developed vision-based, data-driven tactile sensors and explored their applications in robot control and dexterous manipulation. Carlo is a recipient of the Best Demo Paper Award at RSS 2025, the 2022 ETH Medal, and the Best Paper Award at RoboSoft 2022. He was selected as a Rising Star at RoboSoft 2025 and as an RSS Pioneer in 2022.

Selected Publications
  1. K. Zakka, B. Tabanpour, Q. Liao, M. Haiderbhai, S. Holt, J. Y. Luo, A. Allshire, E. Frey, K. Sreenath, L. A. Kahrs, C. Sferrazza†, Y. Tassa†, P. Abbeel†. "MuJoCo Playground." Robotics: Science and Systems, 2025.
  2. C. Sferrazza, D. M. Huang, F. Liu, J. Lee, P. Abbeel. "Body transformer: Leveraging robot embodiment for policy learning." Conference on Robot Learning, 2024.
  3. C. Sferrazza, D. M. Huang, X. Lin, Y. Lee, P. Abbeel. "Humanoidbench: Simulated humanoid benchmark for whole-body locomotion and manipulation." Robotics: Science and Systems, 2024.
  4. J. Jones*, O. Mees*, C. Sferrazza*, K. Stachowicz, P. Abbeel, S. Levine. "Beyond sight: Finetuning generalist robot policies with heterogeneous sensors via language grounding." IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2025.
  5. B. Sukhija, S. Coros, A. Krause, P. Abbeel, C. Sferrazza. "MaxInfoRL: Boosting exploration in reinforcement learning through information gain maximization." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025.
  6. T. Bi, C. Sferrazza, R. D'Andrea. "Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of tactile control policies for aggressive swing-up manipulation." IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2021.
  7. C. Sferrazza, R. D'Andrea. "Sim-to-real for high-resolution optical tactile sensing: From images to three-dimensional contact force distributions." Soft Robotics, 2022.
  8. C. Sferrazza, R. D'Andrea. "Design, motivation and evaluation of a full-resolution optical tactile sensor." Sensors, 2019.