About me

I’m a PhD student in robotics at the University of Siena, working on reinforcement learning for mobile robot navigation in crowded and unstructured environments.

Research topics

• Reinforcement learning
• Social navigation
• Human motion models

Publications

1. Van Der Meer, T., Garulli, A., Giannitrapani, A., & Quartullo, R. (2025). Reward Shaping in Learning-Based Social Navigation Systems. Constrained Control and Machine Learning: Emerging Methodologies and Applications. |   Paper |   Github   |
2. Van Der Meer, T., Garulli, A., Giannitrapani, A., & Quartullo, R. (2025). Safe Robot Navigation with Reinforcement Learning using Dirichlet Distributions and Social Attention. 2025 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR). |   Paper |   Github   |
3. Van Der Meer, T., Garulli, A., Giannitrapani, A., & Quartullo, R. (2025). A Comparative Study of Human Motion Models in Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Social Robot Navigation. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. |   Paper |   Github   |