IEEE RAS Saridis Leadership Award (2018) Antonio Bicchi is an Italian scientist interested in robotics and intelligent machines.

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.

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),[8] 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),[9] WALK-MAN[10] (on humanoid robots for disaster intervention), and SOMA (on soft manipulation systems).

[12] Two subsequent ERC PoC projects (SoftHands Pro-H and SoftHandler) explored the translation of these concepts in real-world products for prosthetics and industrial applications, respectively.

[3] In 2015 he founded and was subsequently editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters magazine, which in just two years has become the largest scientific journal in the entire field.

[17] In 2019 he co-founded the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines (I-RIM), the association of researchers and industrialists in the field whose motto is "AI, fleshed out.