Rate My Professor Fares Abu-Dakka

Fares Abu-Dakka is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and an Affiliated Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi, having joined the institution in September 2024. He directs the Robot Learning & Control Lab and is associated faculty with the Mechanical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments at NYU Tandon. Previously, he was a Lecturer and Researcher in the Faculty of Engineering at Mondragon University (2023–2024), Senior Scientist and Leader of the Robot Learning Group at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence, Technical University of Munich (2022–2023), Research Fellow at Aalto University, Finland (2019–2022), Postdoctoral Researcher at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy (2016–2019), and Visiting Professor at Carlos III University of Madrid (2013–2016). Abu-Dakka holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Robotics from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain (2011), an M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from the same university (2015), a DEA in Mechanical Engineering – Robotics (2006), and a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Birzeit University, Palestine (2003).

Abu-Dakka's research centers on advancing robotic manipulation through the integration of control theory, differential geometry, and machine learning to enhance performance, adaptability, and safety. His work develops algorithms enabling robots to learn skills via demonstration, reinforcement learning, and adaptive control, with emphasis on geometric control and physical human–robot interaction. He has published extensively in top robotics forums, including “Dynamic Movement Primitives in Robotics: A Tutorial Survey” (International Journal of Robotics Research, 2023), “Learning Stable Robotic Skills on Riemannian Manifolds” (Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2023), “CITR: A Coordinate-Invariant Task Representation for Robotic Manipulation” (IEEE ICRA 2024), “Safe Execution of Learned Orientation Skills with Conic Control Barrier Functions” (IEEE ICRA 2024), “MeshDMP: Motion Planning on Discrete Manifolds using Dynamic Movement Primitives” (IEEE ICRA 2025), and “Fusion Dynamical Systems with Machine Learning in Imitation Learning: A Comprehensive Overview” (Information Fusion, 2024). As an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and IEEE Transactions on Robotics, he contributes to the field’s editorial standards. Abu-Dakka is an IEEE Senior Member since 2024 and a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Society since 2024.