About Me

I am Wadhah Zai El Amri, a PhD researcher at the L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. My work lies at the intersection of robotic perception, tactile sensing, and machine learning, with a particular focus on enabling robots to perceive and understand physical contact with the world.

I received my M.Sc. in Intelligent Systems from Bielefeld University in 2022, and my B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences in 2020.

Research Interests: Tactile sensing for robotics, transfer learning across sensor modalities, vibro-acoustic perception, deep reinforcement learning, and sim-to-real transfer.

Feel free to reach out if you are interested in collaborating or discussing any of these topics.

News

• Apr 2026 — Paper accepted to Elsevier Robotics and Autonomous Systems: SPLIT: Separating Physical-Contact via Latent Arithmetic in Image-Based Tactile Sensors
• Jan 2026 — Preprint submitted: Vibro-Sense: Robust Vibration-based Impulse Response Localization and Trajectory Tracking for Robotic Hands
• Aug 2025 — Preprint submitted: Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands?
• May 2025 — Paper accepted to ICRA 2025: ACROSS: A Deformation-Based Cross-Modal Representation for Robotic Tactile Perception

Publications

SPLIT: Separating Physical-Contact via Latent Arithmetic in Image-Based Tactile Sensors

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero (2026). "SPLIT: Separating Physical-Contact via Latent Arithmetic in Image-Based Tactile Sensors." Elsevier Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal.

Vibro-Sense: Robust Vibration-based Impulse Response Localization and Trajectory Tracking for Robotic Hands

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero (2026). "Vibro-Sense: Robust Vibration-based Impulse Response Localization and Trajectory Tracking for Robotic Hands." 2026 Submitted to Springer Autonomous Robots Journal, 2026.

Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands?

Alexander Fabisch, Wadhah Zai El Amri, Chandandeep Singh, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero (2025). "Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands?" 2026 Submitted to Springer Autonomous Robots Journal, 2026.

ACROSS: A Deformation-Based Cross-Modal Representation for Robotic Tactile Perception

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Malte Kuhlmann, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero (2025). "ACROSS: A Deformation-Based Cross-Modal Representation for Robotic Tactile Perception." 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, USA, 2025.

Transferring Tactile Data Across Sensors

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Malte Kuhlmann, and Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero (2024). "Transferring Tactile Data Across Sensors." in 40th Anniversary of the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA@40), Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Sept. 2024, pp. 1540–1542.

Optimizing BioTac Simulation for Realistic Tactile Perception

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero (2024). "Optimizing BioTac Simulation for Realistic Tactile Perception." 2024 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Yokohama, Japan, 2024, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/IJCNN60899.2024.10650656..

Vibro-Sense: A Bio-Inspired Vibration-Based Tactile Sensor for Robotics

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Nicolas Faundes, and Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero (2025). "Vibro-Sense: A Bio-Inspired Vibration-Based Tactile Sensor for Robotics." in 1st German Robotics Conference (GRC), Nuremberg, Germany, March. 2025, pp. 1–3.

A Review of the Role of Causality in Developing Trustworthy AI Systems

Niloy Ganguly, Dren Fazlija, Maryam Badar, Marco Fisichella, Sandipan Sikdar, Johanna Schrader, Jonas Wallat, Koustav Rudra, Manolis Koubarakis, Gourab K. Patro, Wadhah Zai El Amri, and Wolfgang Nejdl (2023). "A Review of the Role of Causality in Developing Trustworthy AI Systems." arXiv:2302.06975.

Hierarchical Decentralized Deep Reinforcement Learning Architecture for a Simulated Four-Legged Agent

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Luca Hermes, Malte Schilling (2022). "Hierarchical Decentralized Deep Reinforcement Learning Architecture for a Simulated Four-Legged Agent." In: Nicosia, G., et al. Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science. LOD 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13811. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25891-6_20.

Transfer Learning with Jukebox for Music Source Separation

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Oliver Tautz, Helge Ritter, Andrew Melnik (2022). "Transfer Learning with Jukebox for Music Source Separation." Part of the IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology book series (IFIPAICT,volume 647).

Open Set Task Augmentation Facilitates Generalization of Deep Neural Networks Trained on Small Data Sets

Wadhah Zai El Amri, Felix Reinhart, Wolfram Schenck (2022). "Open Set Task Augmentation Facilitates Generalization of Deep Neural Networks Trained on Small Data Sets." Neural Computing and Applications, 34, 6067–6083.