Lotfi El Hafi

Lotfi El Hafi, PhD, is the President & Founder of Coarobo GK, Japan, and a former Research Associate Professor at Ritsumeikan University, Japan.

He received his MScEng in Mechatronics from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium, in 2013, and his PhD in Engineering from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan, in 2017. His master’s thesis contributed to TICO compression, now standardized as JPEG XS, for Ultra HD 4K/8K video distribution during an internship at intoPIX SA, Belgium, and later as a Sales Engineer while completing the AWEX International Business & Management EXPLORT Program. He then joined the Robotics Laboratory at NAIST as a recipient of the MEXT Scholarship in 2014. His PhD thesis proposed a novel eye-tracking method, “Simultaneous Tracking and Attention Recognition from Eyes (STARE),” which leveraged deep learning to extract behaviors from scene images reflected in the eyes, earning him the “Best of IET and IBC 2016–2017.”

He joined the Ritsumeikan Global Innovation Research Organization (R-GIRO) of Ritsumeikan University, Japan, for the “International and Interdisciplinary Research Center for the Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence and Semiotics (AI+Semiotics)” project as a Senior Researcher in 2017, later becoming a Research Assistant Professor in 2019. His research activities included service robotics, AI, and system integration, with a particular interest in multimodal interaction in extended reality (XR). In this regard, he received 2 research awards from JST CREST: the “Best Award for Research Proposal Breaking Hagita-CREST Shell: Visualization of Emergent Reality in Robotics for Future Harmonious Interaction” and the “Best Award for Forecasting Research Proposal: Toward Early Realization of Harmonious Human-Robot Interaction.”

He has also won numerous international robotics competition prizes, including the “1st Place” in the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge at IEEE ICRA 2016, the “Finalist Prize” in the Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017, the “NEDO Chairman’s Award for Excellence in World Robot Summit” (2018, 2020), the “SICE Award for WRS Future Convenience Store Challenge” (2018, 2025), the “METI Minister’s Award for Excellence in World Robot Summit” (2020), the “WRS Executive Committee Chairperson’s Award for Excellence” (2025), the “2nd Place Regional Prize in Eastern Asia + South Eastern Asia” in the OpenCV AI Competition 2021, and multiple “1st Place” finishes in the WRS Future Convenience Store Challenge since 2018, including at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2022 and at the Osaka-Kansai Expo 2025. These contributions addressed both the technological and theoretical challenges of super-smart societies (Society 5.0), in collaboration with the Robotics Hub of Panasonic Corporation, Japan, where he served as a Research Advisor for Robotics Competitions from 2019 to 2026. There, he contributed to the development of AMIS, or “Autonomous Manipulation for Intelligence Services,” a human-centered robotic platform, also in collaboration with NAIST.

His recognized achievements in competitions also led to his appointment as a Specially Appointed Researcher of HSR Community by Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan, from 2020 to 2022, during which he developed a containerized Software Development Environment (SDE) using cloud-first, open-source technologies to accelerate cross-institutional collaborative R&D. More than 20 institutions across Japan and the EU are known to have tested the SDE, with half adopting it for research. This endeavor earned him the inaugural “HSR Community Research Encouragement Award” from RSJ in 2022.

He then served as a Research Associate Professor at the Research Organization of Science and Technology of Ritsumeikan University, Japan, from 2023 to 2026. His contributions to the development of large-scale cognitive architectures for the JST CREST project “Symbol Emergence in Robotics for Future Human-Machine Collaboration” and the JST Moonshot R&D Program “The Realization of an Avatar-Symbiotic Society where Everyone Can Perform Active Roles without Constraint” led him to investigate the mechanisms of multimodal robot learning in XR. His work on probabilistic inference, contrastive learning, and concept formation for service robots earned the “Excellent Research and Technology Award” from RSJ in 2024 and the “Best Paper Award” at IEEE/SICE SII 2023, IEEE IRC 2024, and from the RSJ Advanced Robotics journal in 2025.

Over the years, he has authored over 80 academic publications and holds an h-index of 14 on Google Scholar, with more than 600 citations. He helped build a vibrant research environment at Ritsumeikan University through successful grant applications as a Principal Investigator, including a competitive JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists titled “Emergent Reality: Knowledge Formation from Multimodal Learning through Human-Robot Interaction in Extended Reality,” securing over 15 million JPY in cumulative internal and external funding. He also informally supervised graduate students and international interns in the Emergent Systems Laboratory at Ritsumeikan University and formally supervised 4 international master’s theses with UCLouvain.

He is an active member of IEEE (since 2015) and RSJ (since 2017), and a former member of JSME (2017–2022). He has peer-reviewed over 35 manuscripts for prestigious journals and conferences and served as Associate Editor for IEEE RO-MAN 2021 and Publicity Chair for IEEE/SICE SII 2026. Since 2026, he has dedicated himself to Coarobo GK, Japan, a company he founded in 2019 that now brings physical AI to real-world robots by providing containerized SDE solutions for researchers and developers in the fields of service robotics and AI. There, he supervises the development of OpenRoIS, an open-source middleware implementing the OMG Robotic Interaction Service (RoIS) framework, so that a service application written once runs on physical robots, virtual avatars, and AI services alike.

Beyond his work, he is a devoted husband and father, and he holds his commitment to his family as a core value. He lives in Nara with his wife, whom he met during his PhD at NAIST, and their three children, to whose pursuits he dedicates most of his time off.

[Last updated: September 2026.]