Bruno Siciliano (Naples, 27 October 1959) is an Italian engineer, academic and scientific popularizer. He is professor of Control and Robotics at the University of Naples Federico II, Chair of the Scientific Council of the ICAROS Center, and Director of the PRISMA Lab at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. He is also Honorary Professor at the university of Óbuda where he holds the Rudolf Kálmán chair.
Education and career
In 1982, Siciliano graduated in Electronic Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II where he then obtained a PhD in Electronic and Computer Engineering in 1987. Fascinated by the readings of Isaac Asimov's books on science fiction and cybernetics, he decided to approach robotics in terms of research. From September 1985 to June 1986 he was visiting scholar at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Siciliano became assistant professor of Automatic Control in 1989 at the Department of Computer and Systems Engineering of the University of Naples and then associate professor in 1992. He moved to the role of full professor in 2000 for the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering of the University of Salerno. Since 2003 he has been full professor of Automatic Control at the Department of Computer and Systems Engineering, which has later become the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology.
Since 2016 he has been Honorary Professor of the University of Óbuda from which he received the chair named after Rudolf Emil Kálmán in 2019.
Siciliano was President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2008 to 2009. From 2013 to 2021 he was a member of the Board of Directors of the European Robotics Association.In 2019, he was among the founding members of the National Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (I-RIM). He is a member of the I-RIM Board of Directors. Since 2020 he is on the Board of the International Foundation of Robotics Research.Since 2020 he is an IFAC Pavel J. Nowacki Distinguished Lecturer.