28 accepted papers
Safety is of utmost importance in surgical robots, as they operate in a complex and dynamic environment that directly impacts the patient’s health based on the surgical procedure’s success. One of the main difficulties in the control of surgical manipulators is in efficiently encoding dynamic nonlin…
This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) control framework for bevel-tip steerable needles that combines model predictive control (MPC) with hierarchical supervisory logic. The MPC layer uses a reduced-order two-mode switching model to generate the desired control actions, while the supervisory
Controlling the contact force on various surfaces is essential in many robotic applications such as in service tasks or industrial use cases. Mostly, classical impedance and hybrid motion-force control approaches are employed for these kinds of physical interaction scenarios. In this work, an extend
Sharing the control of a robotic system with an autonomous controller allows a human to reduce his/her cognitive and physical workload during the execution of a task. In recent years, the development of inference and learning techniques has widened the spectrum of applications of shared control (SC)
Humans in contrast to robots are excellent in performing fine manipulation tasks owing to their remarkable dexterity and sensorimotor organization. Enabling robots to acquire such capabilities, necessitates a framework that not only replicates the human behaviour but also integrates the multi-sensor…
Depalletizing robotic systems are commonly deployed to automatize and speed-up parts of logistic processes. Despite this, the necessity to adapt the preexisting logistic processes to the automatic systems often impairs the application of such robotic solutions to small business realities like superm
Automatic depalletizing is becoming a practice widely applied in warehouses to automatize and speed-up logistics. On the other hand, the necessity to adapt the preexisting logistic lines to a custom automatic system can be a limit for the application of robotic solutions into smaller facilities like
Modern robots act in dynamic and partially unknown environments where path replanning can be mandatory if changes in the environment are observed. Task-prioritized control strategies are well known and effective solutions to ensure local adaptation of robot behaviour. The highest priority in a stack…
Recently, underactuated robotic hands have been exploited for dexterous in-hand manipulation, after having been proven efficient in performing versatile adaptive grasps. However, the reported in-hand manipulation skills are usually associated with parasitic motion, which may complicate control and a
Integrating a robotic system into the depalletizing process of a supermarket demands a high level of autonomy, based on strong perceptive capabilities. This letter presents a system for detection, recognition, and localization of heterogeneous cases in a depalletizing robotic cell, using a single RG
In robot-aided surgery, during the execution of typical bimanual procedures such as dissection, surgical tools can collide and create serious damage to the robot or tissues. The da Vinci robot is one of the most advanced and certainly the most widespread robotic system dedicated to minimally invasiv
During suturing tasks performed with minimally invasive surgical robots, configuration singularities and joint limits often force surgeons to interrupt the task and re-grasp the needle using dual-arm movements. This yields an increased operator's cognitive load, time-to-completion and performance de…
This letter addresses the task of stabilizing a wheeled unmanned aerial vehicle on a pipe, which is an emerging application in oil and gas facilities for nondestructive measurements. After the derivation of the dynamic model of the system, a discrete-time nonlinear model predictive controller is des
Polyp dissection requires very accurate detection of the region of interest and high-precision cutting with adequate safety margins. Robot-assisted polyp dissection is a solution to accomplish high-quality intervention. This paper proposes a method to constrain the robot to follow an accurate dissec…
In Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery (MIRS) a robot is interposed between the surgeon and the surgical site to increase the precision, dexterity, and to reduce surgeon's effort and cognitive load with respect to the standard laparoscopic interventions. However, the modern robotic systems for MIRS a…
In laparoscopic minimally invasive robotic surgery, a teleoperated robot is interposed between the patient and the surgeon. Despite the robot aid, the manipulation capabilities of surgical instruments are far from those of the human hand. In this letter, we want to make a step forward toward robotic
This paper presents a method for tracking multiple interacting deformable objects undergoing rigid motions, elastic deformations and contacts, using image and point cloud data provided by an RGB-D sensor. A joint registration frame-work is proposed, based on physical Finite Element Method (FEM) elas…
We propose novel haptic guidance methods for a dual-arm telerobotic manipulation system, which are able to deal with several different constraints, such as collisions, joint limits, and singularities. We combine the haptic guidance with shared-control algorithms for autonomous orientation control an
Nonprehensile dynamic manipulation can be reasonably considered as the most complex manipulation task. It might be argued that such a task is still rather far from being fully solved and applied in robotics. This survey tries to collect the results reached so far by the research community about plan
A mechanical system consisting of a hoop and a pole is considered, for which the corresponding dynamic model represents an underactuated system subject to second-order nonholonomic constraints. The pursued goal is to simultaneously track a trajectory in the unactuated coordinates and to stabilize th
During robot-aided surgical interventions, the surgeon can be benefitted from the application of virtual fixtures (VFs). Though very effective, this technique is very often not practicable in unstructured surgical environments. In order to comply with the environmental deformation, both the VF geome
In this work, we demonstrate how autonomous pizza tossing and catching can be achieved. Under the assumption that the pizza dough is grasped by a number of fingers with soft contact, we formulate the grasp constraints and use them to derive the individual and combined Euler-Lagrange dynamic equation
One of the main problems in the prosthetic hand design is to provide the hand with a reliable system for force and slippage control. The real-time detection of an object slippage during grasping plays a fundamental role in performing a stable grasp. Aim of this paper is to propose and test (i) a sys
In this work, a synergy-based reinforcement learning algorithm has been developed to confer autonomous grasping capabilities to anthropomorphic hands. In the presence of high degrees of freedom, classical machine learning techniques require a number of iterations that increases with the size of the…
A control framework for nonprehensile planar rolling dynamic manipulation is derived in this letter. By rotating around the center of mass, the manipulator moves a part without grasping it but exploiting its dynamics. Given some assumptions on the shapes of both the object and the manipulator, a sta
This paper presents a method to track in real-time a 3D textureless object which undergoes large deformations such as elastic ones, and rigid motions, using the point cloud data provided by an RGB-D sensor. This solution is expected to be useful for enhanced manipulation of humanoid robotic systems.…
In many real life scenarios, which span from domestic interactions to industrial manufacturing processes, the objects to be manipulated are non-rigid and deformable, hence, both the location of the object and its deformation have to be tracked. Different methodologies have been applied in literature…
This paper proposes a new visual controller to endow flying manipulators with the capability of cooperatively and automatically positioning an assembly part on a visual target. We consider two VToL UAVs each equipped with a robot manipulator and a video camera. The two manipulators are rigidly conne…