Fabrizio Flacco: In Memoriam
Guardiagrele, Italy 25.11.1981 - Montpellier, France 18.9.2016
Original message
sent on September 19, 2016 by Alessandro De Luca to share with friends
and colleagues the tragic news of the death of Fabrizio Flacco
Dear friends and colleagues
It is with my deepest sorrow that I am sharing with you the tragic news
of the death of Fabrizio Flacco. Some of you may already know that he
suddenly passed away yesterday in Montpellier, due to a heart attack
while jogging with a friend. We don't really know yet what was the
exact cause.
Fabrizio Flacco has been a student of Antonio Bicchi in Pisa until
2007. He moved then to Sapienza where he took his PhD at the end of
2011, with a thesis on "Modeling and Control of Robots with Compliant
Actuation". In between, he spent an eight-month research period at the AI Lab in
Stanford with Oussama Khatib. He was then a post-doc at our DIAG
department, working actively for the FP7 SAPHARI and then for the H2020
COMANOID european projects. In December 2015, he became Chargé de Recherche (CR2) of the CNRS at
LIRMM in Montpellier where he moved with his family: his wife Floriana
and their two 4- and 3-year old daughters Flavia and Francesca.
I have been working with Fabrizio for about eight years and I have
always appreciated his technical expertise, innovative thinking,
availability and reliability, joined with a reserved, but very easy
character. You can find a short scientific CV of him at http://www.lirmm.fr/users/utilisateurs-lirmm/fabrizio-flacco.
Out of his contributions, I just want to remember the work that led to
the Best Conference Paper Award that he received at the 4th IEEE-RAS
International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and BioMechatronics in
2012. That work provided an important control framework for safety,
coexistence, and collaboration in physical human-robot interaction. You
can see Fabrizio illustrating the stand of these results in 2013 in a
video available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIIhY8E3HFg.
I mention also his work on kinematic control of redundant robots under
hard motion constraints, which appeared as a regular paper in the IEEE
Transactions on Robotics in June 2015 (coauthored with Oussama and me).
For this paper, Fabrizio has just received the IEEE RAS Italian Chapter Young Author Best Paper Award 2016 (see http://www.i-ras.it/node/263). In fact, he was not yet 35 years old. He came to Rome to receive this national award at the yearly meeting of
the chapter at the beginning of September. This was also the last time
I have met him.
The funerals will take place in his home region Abruzzi by the end of
this week, depending also on the legal procedures for bringing him back
to Italy. Please contact me by email or cell phone if you wish more
information.
Alessandro
Later information
Antonio Franchi created a webpage for Fabrizio where many friends and colleagues have posted messages, memories, and photos.
On October 10, 2016, Fabrizio's scientific profile was presented during the workshop on Safety-Related Sensing for Collaborative Applications that he had organized for the IROS 2016 conference in Daejeon, Korea.
Most of the videos produced by Fabrizio can be found in the playlists Physical human-robot interaction and Kinematic control of redundant robots of the DIAG Robotics Lab YouTube channel.
Fabrizio was remembered also in the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (December 2016), both in the Editor's Desk article of Bram Vanderborght and in a special In Memoriam article.
The
IEEE RAS Italian Chapter has decided to rename its YABP award after
Fabrizio. The first "Fabrizio Flacco" Young Author Best Paper Award was
given at the annual meeting in Milano, on September 11, 2017, handed
out by his wife Floriana. See http://www.i-ras.it/node/129.
DIAG Robotics Lab