Antonio Bicchi is an Italian scientist interested in robotics and intelligent machines. He is professor at the University of Pisa and senior researcher at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa. He is an adjunct professor at the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, US. He is a Fellow of IEEE since 2005, and received the IEEE Saridis Leadership Award and the “Ordine del Cherubino” from University of Pisa in 2019. Early life After obtaining a Laurea (magna cum laude) from the University of Pisa in 1984 and a Ph.D. from University of Bologna in 1988, Bicchi was with the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA. From 1990s to 2012 he directed the Research Center “E. Piaggio” at the University of Pisa where he was also chairman of the Robotics in the Department of Information Engineering. During his direction, the Center grew in size and in scientific prestige, leading it to count more than 100 researchers and manage over 60 fundamental and applied research projects. In 2009 he was appointed as senior scientist by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, where he created and leads the research line on Soft Robotics for Human Cooperation and Rehabilitation. Since 2013 he serves as an adjunct professor of the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where he collaborates with Marco Santello and other colleagues in NSF and DARPA rehabilitation-oriented projects. Research Bicchi has contributed to the fields of automatic control (the science and engineering of systems), to haptics (the science and technology for the sense of touch), and to robotics, especially focusing on articulated soft robotics. He has coordinated several important research projects funded by the EU in the FP7 and H2020 programmes, including CHAT (on the scalability, reconfigurability and security of distributed control for heterogeneous cyberphysical systems), PHRIENDS (on dependability and safety of physical human-robot interaction), THE Hand Embodied (on natural and artificial hands), and SoftPro (on the theory and open-source technologies for upper limb prosthetics and rehabilitation). He was scientific co-coordinator of several others, including TOUCH-HAPSYS (on haptics science and interfaces), WALK-MAN (on humanoid robots for disaster intervention), and SOMA (on soft manipulation systems). His 2012-17 ERC AG project SoftHands used neuroscience and soft robotics technologies to develop a new generation of artificial hands. Two subsequent ERC PoC projects