17 accepted papers
Pneumatic grippers are hugely employed in robotic applications. Nonetheless, their control is not easy due to difficulty in managing the pressure inside their air chambers. Pneumatic grippers have often simple structure though the lack of affordable control algorithms complicates their usage. Motiva
Performing large step-ups is a challenging task for a humanoid robot. It requires the robot to perform motions at the limit of its reachable workspace while straining to move its body upon the obstacle. This paper presents a non-linear trajectory optimization method for generating step-up motions. W…
In this paper, we describe a planner capable of generating walking trajectories by using the centroidal dynamics and the full kinematics of a humanoid robot model. The interaction between the robot and the walking surface is modeled explicitly through a novel contact parametrization. The approach is…
Robotic arms can perform grasping actions thanks to their “dexteorus” part, i.e. the gripper. Among the various categories, nowadays pneumatic grippers became the most employed in industry, as they have low cost and little bulkiness. Despite their simplicity, controlling the force applied by these g…
A common approach to the generation of walking patterns for humanoid robots consists in adopting a layered control architecture. This paper proposes an architecture composed of three nested control loops. The outer loop exploits a robot kinematic model to plan the footstep positions. In the mid laye…
Tactile sensing is one important element that can enable robots to interact with an unstructured world. By having tactile perception, a robot can explore its environment by touching objects. Like human skin, a tactile sensor that can provide rich information such as distributed normal and shear forc
Hand-eye coordination is a requirement for many manipulation tasks including grasping and reaching. However, accurate hand-eye coordination has shown to be especially difficult to achieve in complex robots like the iCub humanoid. In this work, we solve the hand-eye coordination task using a visuomot…
The torso of a humanoid robot is a fundamental part of its kinematic structure because it defines the reachable workspace, supports the entire upper-body and can be used to control the position of the center of mass. The majority of the torso joints are designed exploiting serial or differential mec…
We consider object recognition in the context of lifelong learning, where a robotic agent learns to discriminate between a growing number of object classes as it accumulates experience about the environment. We propose an incremental variant of the Regularized Least Squares for Classification (RLSC)…
Future humanoid robots will be expected to carry out a wide range of tasks for which they had not been originally equipped by learning new skills and adapting to their environment. A crucial requirement towards that goal is to be able to take advantage of external elements as tools to perform tasks…
In recent years the robotics field has witnessed an interesting new trend. Several companies started the production of service robots whose aim is to cooperate with humans. The robots developed so far are either rather expensive or unsuitable for manipulation tasks. This article presents the result…
In robotic systems with moving cameras control of gaze allows for image stabilization, tracking and attention switching. Proper integration of these capabilities lets the robot exploit the kinematic redundancy of the oculomotor system to improve tracking performance and extend the field of view, whi…
This paper presents a novel approach for incremental semiparametric inverse dynamics learning. In particular, we consider the mixture of two approaches: Parametric modeling based on rigid body dynamics equations and nonparametric modeling based on incremental kernel methods, with no prior informatio
Application domains of robotic systems are growing in complexity. It seems therefore plausible that robotic software will continue to be designed to be executed on distributed computer architectures interconnected through a network. It is a common practice today to rely on best-effort performance an…
Tactile sensing is of fundamental importance for object manipulation and perception. Several sensors for hands have been proposed in the literature, however, only a few of them can be fully integrated with robotic hands. Typical problems preventing integration include the need for deformable sensors…
With robots leaving factory environments and entering less controlled domains, possibly sharing living space with humans, safety needs to be guaranteed. To this end, some form of awareness of their body surface and the space surrounding it is desirable. In this work, we present a unique method that…
The ability to learn about and efficiently use tools constitutes a desirable property for general purpose humanoid robots, as it allows them to extend their capabilities beyond the limitations of their own body. Yet, it is a topic that has only recently been tackled from the robotics community. Most…