65 accepted papers
Modular continuum soft arms represent an emerging class of robotic systems characterized by flexible, highly deformable structures. Designing shape controllers for these arms poses significant challenges due to their modeling complexity and hyper-redundant nature. Our goal is to develop a scalable c…
This paper tackles the challenges of automating battery removal from small electronic devices, such as heat cost allocators and smoke detectors. The process is critical for mitigating fire hazards caused by lithium batteries in recycling facilities and for supporting a circular economy. We focus on …
The development of prosthetic feet that closely replicate the natural biomechanics of the human foot remains a significant challenge in prosthetics engineering. This paper presents the design and testing of a novel agonist-antagonist architecture for the ankle joint of a passive prosthetic foot feat
Modular continuum soft arms represent an emerging class of robotic systems characterized by flexible, highly deformable structures. Designing shape controllers for these arms poses significant challenges due to their modeling complexity and hyper-redundant nature. Our goal is to develop a scalable c
Soft robots enable safe and robust operations in unstructured environments. However, the nonlinearities of their continuum structure complicate the accomplishment of classic robotic tasks, such as pick and place. In this work, we propose the R-Soft Inverted Pendulum, a Soft Inverted Pendulum (SIP) a
This study presents the Prosthetic Upper-Limb Sensory Enhancement (PULSE), a novel dual feedback device completely integrated into a prosthetic socket. The core of the system includes two compact vibrotactile actuators and two silicone chambers in contact with the user’s skin. These components provi…
Fully exploiting soft robots' capabilities requires devising strategies that can accurately control their movements with the limited amount of control sources available. This task is challenging for reasons including the hard-to-model dynamics, the system's underactuation, and the need of using a pr
Standing-up is a task that humanoids need to be able to perform in order to be employed in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a new robust strategy for a humanoid to stand up in challenging scenarios where no completely preplanned motion can accomplish the same task. This strategy exploits th
Soft tactile optical sensors have opened up new possibilities for endowing artificial robotic hands with advanced touch-related properties; however, their use for compliance discrimination has been poorly investigated and mainly relies on data-driven methods. Discrimination of object compliance is c
Frequently, ground robots are hampered by debris and objects on the ground, and safely surpassing them is not always trivial. On the contrary, a robot capable of flying is intrinsically immune to such obstacles and, therefore, greatly enhances the possibility of inspecting and intervening in adverse…
Teleoperation is a widely adopted strategy to control robotic manipulators executing complex tasks that require highly dexterous movements and critical high-level intelligence. Classical teleoperation schemes are based on either joystick control, or on more intuitive interfaces which map directly th
Embedding elastic elements into legged robots through mechanical design enables highly efficient oscillating patterns that resemble natural gaits. However, current trajectory planning techniques miss the opportunity of taking advantage of these natural motions. This work proposes a locomotion planni…
The swing-up is a classical problem of control theory that has already been widely studied in the literature. Despite that, swinging up an underactuated compliant arm considerably increases the problem complexity. Indeed, in addition to the problem of underactuation, compliant systems usually presen
The regulation of the link positions of compliant robots, damping out undesired link oscillations while preserving the system's inherent elasticity is still a challenging task in practical applications. This task becomes even harder to be tackled in the case of compliant robots driven by agonistic-a
In many real-world manipulation problems, the constraints imposed by the environment on an object are tight. In these cases, most state-of-the-art planners struggle to fit satisfactorily in low dimensional sub-manifolds, while still ensuring geometric and force feasibility. On the other hand, humans…
In recent years, the spread of data-driven approaches for robotic grasp synthesis has come with the increasing need for reliable datasets, which can be built e.g. through video labelling. To this goal, it is important to define suitable rules to characterize the main human grasp types, for easily id
Modern active prostheses can be used to recover part of the motor function associated with the loss of a hand. Nevertheless, most sensory abilities are lost, and the person has to manage interaction by relying mostly on visual feedback. Despite intensive research devoted to convey touch related cues
The need for users' safety and technology accept-ability has incredibly increased with the deployment of co-bots physically interacting with humans in industrial settings, and for people assistance. A well-studied approach to meet these requirements is to ensure human-like robot motions. Classic sol…
Robots face the eventuality of falling. Unplanned events, external disturbances and technical failures may lead a robot to a condition where even an effective dynamic stabilization is not sufficient to maintain the equilibrium. Therefore, it is essential to equip robotic platforms with both active a
In this work, we investigate the behavior of artificial hands under impulsive load conditions. Resilience to impacts has been seldom considered in grasp and manipulation literature and benchmarks, although it is one of the most relevant issues in a number of applications involving physical interacti
Robotic hand engineers usually focus on finger capabilities, often disregarding the palm contribution. Inspired by human anatomy, this paper explores the advantages of including a flexible concave palm into the design of a robotic hand actuated by soft synergies. We analyse how the inclusion of an a
This work proposes a method to grasp unknown objects with robotic hands based on demonstrations by a skilled human operator. Not only are humans efficacious at grasping with their own hands but are also capable of grasping objects using robotic hands. Therefore, we consider how the grasping skills o
Piecewise constant curvature models have proven to be an useful tool for describing kinematics and dynamics of soft robots. However, in their three dimensional formulation they suffer from many issues limiting their range of applicability - as discontinuities and singularities - mainly concerning th
An approach toward intuitive and easy robot programming, consists to transfer skills from humans to machines, through demonstration. A vast literature exists on learning from multiple demonstrations. This paper, on the other hand, tackles the problem of providing all needed information to execute a…
This letter proposes a framework which is able to generate a sequence of three-dimensional human dance poses for a given music. The proposed framework consists of three components: a music feature encoder, a pose generator, and a music genre classifier. We focus on integrating these components for g
Trajectory tracking of flexible link robots is a classical control problem. Historically, the link elasticity was considered as something to be removed. Hence, the control performance was guaranteed by adopting high-gain feedback loops and, possibly, a dynamic compensation with the result to stiffen…
Without proprioception, i.e., the intrinsic capability of a body to perceive its own limb position, completing daily life activities would require constant visual attention and it would be challenging or even impossible. This situation is similar to the one experienced after limb amputation and in r
Both humanoid robotics and prosthetics rely on the possibility of implementing spherical active joints to build dexterous robots and useful prostheses. There are three possible kinematic implementations of spherical joints: serial, parallel, and hybrid, each one with its own advantages and disadvant
One of the main research trends toward next-generation prostheses and bionic aids is to better replicate human motor behaviours and to improve the interconnection with the human sensory-motor architecture. One of the natural characteristics of the human arm of utmost importance in our interaction wi…
The deployment of robotics in real-world scenarios, which may involve harsh and irregular physical interactions with the environment, such as those when robots operating in a disaster scenario, or the interactions that prosthetic devices may experience, demands hardware, which is physically resilien
The development of effective reduced order models for soft robots is paving the way toward the development of a new generation of model based techniques, which leverage classic rigid robot control. However, several soft robot features differentiate the soft-bodied case from the rigid-bodied one. Fir…
Control of two-wheeled humanoid robots poses several challenges due to the unstable dynamics of their mobile base and the coupling between the upper and lower body dynamics. The problem is often faced in the literature with methods based on the linearized or simplified models that fail in exploiting
This article presents the design of soft material robots with tunable damping properties. This study derives from the investigation of an under-actuated dynamic approach involving multi-chamber pneumatic systems. The co-design of the mechanical parameters (stiffness and damping) of the system along…
Since the spread of robotic systems embedding in their mechanics purposefully designed elastic elements, the interest in characterizing and exploiting non-linear oscillatory behaviors has progressively grown. However, few works so far looked at the problem from the point of view of modal analysis. T…
Recently, the development of soft robots is imposing a change of prospective in several aspects of design and control, moving the robotic field closer to the natural world. Soft robots, like many animals, are often built of continuously deformable elements, and are consequently characterized by a hi
Soft hands are robotic systems that embed compliant elements in their mechanical design. This enables an effective adaptation with the items and the environment, and ultimately, an increase in their grasping performance. These hands come with clear advantages in terms of ease-to-use and robustness i
On compliant robotic systems, modularity is recently adopted for the ease of up- and downscaling and the possibility to downgrade the costs, by moving towards the combination of standard units instead of custom designs. However, modularity on the actuator level itself lacks more thorough evaluation.
Real world applications require robots to operate in unstructured environments. This kind of scenarios may lead to unexpected environmental contacts or undesired interactions, which may harm people or impair the robot. Adjusting the behavior of the system through impedance control techniques is an e…
It is known that high-frequency tactile information conveys useful cues to discriminate important contact properties for manipulation, such as first contact and roughness. Despite this, no practical system, implementing a modality matching paradigm, has been developed so far to convey this informati
Intrinsic Tactile Sensing (ITS) is a well-established technique, relying on force/torque and geometric surface description to find contact centroids. The method works well for rigid surfaces. However, finding a solution for deformable surfaces is an open issue. This work presents two solutions to ex…
It is widely recognized that impedance modulation is a key aspect in applications in which robots significantly interact with the environment or humans. Either active impedance controllers or actuators with passive variable impedance can be exploited to modulate the impedance. However, methods capab
Autonomous vehicles are undergoing a rapid development thanks to advances in perception, planning and control methods and technologies achieved in the last two decades. Moreover, the lowering costs of sensors and computing platforms are attracting industrial entities, empowering the integration and…
Thanks to the growing interest in soft robotics, hydropneumatics and inflatable system dynamics are attracting renewed attention from the scientific community. Typical fluidic systems are composed of several chambers and require a complex and bulky network of active components for their control. Thi…
The reduction of muscular strength in elderly people and patients with neurological movement disorders drastically reduces the hand autonomy for performing several daily activities. This letter presents preliminary results towards a novel supernumerary hand system, i.e., the SoftHand X, that aims to
Recently, the method of choice to exploit robot dynamics for efficient walking is numerical optimization (NO). The main drawback in NO is the computational complexity, which strongly affects the time demand of the solution. Several strategies can be used to make the optimization more treatable and t
Grasp and manipulation is a complex task, deceivingly simple to accomplish for humans in everyday life, yet challenging to implement in a robotic hand. There is a trend in literature to use information obtained from studies on human grasp for the design and control of robotic manipulators. However,…
Postural hand synergies or eigenpostures are joint angle covariation patterns observed in common grasping tasks. A typical definition associates the geometry of synergy vectors and their hierarchy (relative statistical weight) with the principal component analysis of an experimental covariance matri
The endpoint stiffness of the human arm has been long recognized as a key component ensuring the quasi-static stability of the arm physical interactions with the external world. Similarly, the understanding of the joint stiffness behavior can provide complementary insights, e.g., on the underlying s
Recently, the avenue of adaptable, soft robotic hands has opened simplified opportunities to grasp different items; however, the potential of soft end effectors (SEEs) is still largely unexplored, especially in human-robot interaction. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, a simple touch-ba…
An effective robotic wrist represents a key enabling element in robotic manipulation, especially in prosthetics. In this paper, we propose an under-actuated wrist system, which is also adaptable and allows to implement different under-actuation schemes. Our approach leverages upon the idea of soft s…
This paper presents an approach to achieve adaptive grasp of unknown objects whose position is only approximately known via point-cloud data. We exploit the adaptability of a soft robotic hand which can autonomously conform to the shape of a grasped object if properly approached. Once a grasp approa
Sensing contact forces can be a key enabler for higher order dexterous manipulation in robotic hands. To sense the full range of contact pressure distribution would provide the best solution, but it is in practice unfeasible when considering very deformable and adaptable hands. This paper proposes a…
In this paper we present a novel geometric approach to motion planning for constrained robot systems. This problem is notoriously hard, as classical sampling-based methods do not easily apply when motion is constrained in a zero-measure submanifold of the configuration space. Based on results on the…
Tele-operation in the presence of environmental constraints is a well-studied problem, where the difficulties of the transparency-stability trade-off have been elucidated by several important studies. While at the state-of-art, passivity-based stabilizers appear to provide the best insight and comma…
The tutor-tutee hand-in-hand teaching may be the most effective approach for a tutee to acquire new motor skills. Repetitive nature of such procedures in a group setting usually results in a high labour cost and time inefficiency. Potential solution can be utilizing robotic platforms playing the rol…
In this work, to guarantee the Pisa/IIT SoftHand's grasp robustness against slippage, three reflex control modes, namely Current, Pose and Impedance, are implemented and experimentally evaluated. Towards this objective, ThimbleSense fingertip sensors are designed and integrated into the thumb and mi
State of the art of hand prosthetics is divided between simple and reliable gripper-like systems and sophisticate hi-tech poly-articular hands which tend to be complex both in their design and for the patient to operate. In this paper, we introduce the idea of decoding different movement intentions
In this paper a quasi-static framework for optimally controlling the contact force distribution is experimentally verified with the full-size compliant humanoid robot Walk-Man. The proposed approach is general enough to cope with multi-contact scenarios, i.e. robot-environment interactions occurring…
The deployment of robots to assist in environments hostile for humans during emergency scenarios require robots to demonstrate enhanced physical performance, that includes adequate power, adaptability and robustness to physical interactions and efficient operation. This work presents the design and
Effective and stable execution of a remote manipulation task in an uncertain environment requires that the task force and position trajectories of the slave robot be appropriately commanded. To achieve this goal, in teleimpedance control, a reference command which consists of the stiffness and posit…
Two leading qualities of skeletal muscle that produce good performance in uncertain environments are damage tolerance and the ability to modulate impedance. For this reason, robotics researchers are greatly interested in discovering the key characteristics of muscles that give them these properties…
Rendering forces to the user is one of the main goals of haptic technology. While most force-feedback interfaces are robotic manipulators, attached to a fixed frame and designed to exert forces on the users while being moved, more recent haptic research introduced two novel important ideas. On one s…
In this paper, we present a method to reconstruct the configurations of kinematic trees of rigid bodies not using measurements of relative angles (such as, e.g. rotary encoders at joints) but absolute posture sensors (such as IMUs) along with suitable filter algorithms. We argue that the relatively…
The stiffness ellipsoid, i.e. the locus of task-space forces obtained corresponding to a deformation of unit norm in different directions, has been extensively used as a powerful representation of robot interaction capabilities. The size and shape of the stiffness ellipsoid at a given end-effector p…
The term whole-body loco-manipulation refers to the case in which a humanoid robot exploits contacts with the environment, both with the end-effectors and with its internal limbs, in order to balance, move and/or manipulate the environment. In such a situation, high degree of redundancy may not be s…