36 accepted papers
This paper explores the challenge of optimal routing for a mobile robot navigating a dynamic and shared human environment. The primary goal is to minimize the risk of performance degradation during motion, such as delays in completing tasks due to the need for safe or acceptable human-robot encounte…
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
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…
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
Currently, the access to the knowledge of stiffness values is typically constrained to a-priori identified models or datasheet information, which either do not usually take into account the full range of possible stiffness values or need extensive experiments. This work tackles the challenge of stif
Compliant actuation bestows robots with the ability to cope with unstructured environments, move with agility, and interact safely with humans at the expense of reduced tracking accuracy. The inclusion of dampening components aims to reduce oscillatory dynamics and partially restore precision withou…
The majority of humanoid robots adopt flat feet, a choice that can limit their performance when maneuvering over uneven terrains. Recently, a soft robotic foot designed to adapt to the ground was proposed to overcome part of these limitations. This paper presents the results of testing two such feet
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…
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
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
In this paper, we consider a problem of foothold selection for the quadrupedal robots equipped with compliant adaptive feet. Starting from a model of the foot we compute the quality of the potential footholds considering also kinematic constraints and collisions during evaluation. Since terrain asse…
The large majority of legged robots currently employ ball-feet or flat-feet. More recently soft feet have been introduced, to improve walking performance on uneven grounds. Nevertheless, their novel adaptability requires sensor systems beyond traditional Force/Torque sensors to estimate the distribu
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
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
The increasing presence of high density logistic warehouses demands the deployment of fast and flexible robotic solutions. One of the open challenges toward this objective is manipulation in narrow settings. This work addresses such a problem from a design perspective. By observing human arm dexteri
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
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…
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
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
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,…
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…
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…
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 work a novel synergy-based bilateral tele-manipulation strategy is introduced. The proposed algorithm has been primarily developed to remotely control the Pisa/IIT SoftHand (SH) using a 3-finger hand exoskeleton as master device. With a single actuator and a sensory system limited to a posit
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…