The RAINBOW research team’s outstanding research is being celebrated this summer.

Submitted on 02/09/2026
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The RAINBOW research team has once again excelled this summer – congratulations to everyone!

 

Highlights included the prestigious award won by Marco Tognon at the 2026 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) International Conference, as well as the three prizes awarded to researchers from the RAINBOW and SEAMLESS teams at EuroHaptics 2026.

 

Marco Tognon honoured with the 2026 Early Career Spotlight Award

Congratulations to Marco Tognon (Inria researcher) who has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Early Career Spotlight Award at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in Sydney.

This international award is presented annually to a very small number of early-career researchers in recognition of their particularly outstanding scientific contributions to the field of robotics. Previous winners are now among the most recognised researchers in the discipline and are affiliated with leading institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich.

This recognition attests to the quality and impact of Marco Tognon’s work, which focuses in particular on autonomous aerial robotics. One of his objectives is to enable flying robots to autonomously perform physical tasks in a variety of environments, and then to extend these capabilities to multi-robot systems capable of acting and collaborating simultaneously.

 

A strong presence at EuroHaptics 2026

Another highlight of this summer was the participation of several members of the RAINBOW and SEAMLESS teams at EuroHaptics 2026, held in Siena, Italy. Regarded as the leading international conference in the field of haptics, EuroHaptics provided our researchers with the opportunity to present a wide variety of work.

 

In total, the teams presented:

  • 9 full conference papers (2 oral presentations and 7 poster presentations)
  • 7 Work-in-Progress (WiP) papers
  • 3 hands-on demos

This strong scientific participation was also accompanied by three awards.

  • Congratulations to Pierre-Antoine Cabaret (Assistant Professor, INSA Rennes) for the Best Paper Award – Honourable Mention and his co-authors, Louise Devigne (Biomedical Research Engineer), Marie Dandois (Research Occupational Therapist), Emilie Leblong (MPR-MD PhD), Claudio Pacchierotti (CNRS Research Director), Maud Marchal (Professor at INSA Rennes), and Marie Babel (Professor at INSA Rennes) for their paper “Evaluation of Haptic Guidance Strategies with Power Wheelchair Users using a Multi-Actuator Vibrotactile Handle”.
  • Congratulations to Leon Raphalen (Inria PhD student) for the Best Paper Award – Honourable Mention and his co-authors, Marco Ferro (CNRS Research Engineer), Marc Amouroux (ENS Rennes), Paolo Robuffo Giordano (CNRS Research Director), Claudio Pacchierotti (CNRS Research Director) and Marco Tognon (INRIA Researcher) for their paper “Feeling the Constraints: Multi-Sensory Feedback in QP-Based Shared Control via Lagrange Multipliers”.
  • Finally, Claudio Pacchierotti (CNRS Research Director) was presented with the IEEE Transactions on Haptics Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his commitment to the scientific community, particularly in his role as Associate Editor.