Associate Research Scientist · Disney Research Zurich

Sammy Christen

I am an Associate Research Scientist in the robotics team at Disney Research Zurich. I obtained my PhD at the AIT lab, ETH Zurich, supervised by Professor Otmar Hilliges and co-supervised by Professor Jemin Hwangbo. My research focuses on human–robot interaction and dexterous robotic grasping. During my PhD, I spent time at the NVIDIA AI Robotics Lab in Seattle and at Meta Reality Labs.

News

Jan 2026

Our paper Robot Crash Course: Learning Soft and Stylized Falling is accepted at ICRA 2026.
Oct 2025

Invited talk at the AI+X summit.
Aug 2025

Our paper RobustDexGrasp: Robust Dexterous Grasping of General Objects is accepted at CoRL 2025.
Jun 2025

Our paper Autonomous Human-Robot Interaction via Operator Imitation is accepted at IROS 2025.
Jun 2025

Part of the organizing committee at the GenAI-HRI workshop at RSS 2025.
May 2025

Honored as outstanding reviewer at CVPR 2025.
Mar 2025

Served as social media chair at 3DV 2025.
Oct 2024

Started a new position as Postdoctoral Researcher at Disney Research.
Oct 2024

Successfully defended my PhD!

Selected Publications

* indicates equal contribution

ICRA 2026

Robot Crash Course: Learning Soft and Stylized Falling

Pascal Strauch, David Müller, Sammy Christen, Agon Serifi, Ruben Grandia, Espen Knoop, Moritz Bächer

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026

Paper Video

IROS 2025

Autonomous Human-Robot Interaction via Operator Imitation

Sammy Christen, David Müller, Agon Serifi, Ruben Grandia, Georg Wiedebach, Michael A. Hopkins, Espen Knoop, Moritz Bächer

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025

Paper Video

CoRL 2025

RobustDexGrasp: Robust Dexterous Grasping of General Objects

Hui Zhang*, Zijian Wu*, Linyi Huang, Sammy Christen, Jie Song

Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025

Paper Project Code

NeurIPS 2024

Omnigrasp: Grasping Diverse Objects with Simulated Humanoids

Zhengyi Luo, Jinkun Cao, Sammy Christen, Alexander Winkler, Kris Kitani, Weipeng Xu

Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

Paper Project Code

SIGGRAPH Asia 2024

DiffH2O: Diffusion-Based Synthesis of Hand-Object Interactions from Textual Descriptions

Sammy Christen, Shreyas Hampali, Fadime Sener, Edoardo Remelli, Tomas Hodan, Eric Sauser, Shugao Ma, Bugra Tekin

SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Papers, 2024

Paper Project Video Code

CVPR 2023 · Highlight

Learning Human-to-Robot Handovers from Point Clouds

Sammy Christen, Wei Yang, Claudia Pérez-D'Arpino, Otmar Hilliges, Dieter Fox, Yu-Wei Chao

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023 — Highlight (top 2.5%)

Paper Project Video Code

CVPR 2022

D-Grasp: Physically Plausible Dynamic Grasp Synthesis for Hand-Object Interactions

Sammy Christen, Muhammed Kocabas, Emre Aksan, Jemin Hwangbo, Jie Song, Otmar Hilliges

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022

Paper Project Video Code

Reviewing

2025 CoRL, CVPR (outstanding reviewer), ICCV, ICRA, IROS, RA-L, SIGGRAPH Asia
2024 CVPR, EAI@CVPR, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, T-RO
2023 CVPR, ICCV, ICRA, IROS, RA-L, SIGGRAPH, 3DV, Comput Methods Biomech and Biomed Eng
2022 CVPR, ICRA, IROS, RA-L, ECCV (outstanding reviewer), SIGGRAPH Asia, Computers & Graphics
2021 IROS, NeurIPS, RA-L
2020 CHI, RA-L, ICRA