20 accepted papers
The administration and monitoring of shared workspaces are crucial for seamlessly integrating robots to operate in close interactions with humans. Adaptive, versatile, and reliable robot movements are key to achieving effective and successful human-robot synergy. In situations involving unexpected o…
The administration and monitoring of shared workspaces are crucial for seamlessly integrating robots to operate in close interactions with humans. Adaptive, versatile, and reliable robot movements are key to achieving effective and successful human-robot synergy. In situations involving unexpected o
Robotics has shown significant potential in assisting people with disabilities to enhance their independence and involvement in daily activities. Indeed, a societal long-term impact is expected in home-care assistance with the deployment of intelligent robotic interfaces. This work presents a human-
The teleoperation of complex, kinematically redundant robots with loco-manipulation capabilities represents a challenge for human operators, who have to learn how to operate the many degrees of freedom of the robot to accomplish a desired task. In this context, developing an easy-to-learn and easy-t…
Performing autonomous navigation in cluttered and unstructured terrains still remains a challenging task for legged and wheeled mobile robots. To accomplish such a task, online planners shall incorporate new terrain information perceived while the robot is moving within its environment. While hybrid
This work presents the computational design and validation of the Multi-Arm Relocatable Manipulator (MARM), a three-limb robot for space applications, with particular reference to the MIRROR (i.e., the Multi-arm Installation Robot for Readying ORUs and Reflectors) use-case scenario as proposed by th…
Wheeled-legged robots have the potential to navigate in cluttered and irregular scenarios by altering the locomotion modes to adapt to the terrain challenges and effectively reach targeted locations in unstructured spaces. To achieve this functionality, a hybrid locomotion planner is necessary. In t…
The teleoperation of mobile manipulators may pose significant challenges, demanding complex interfaces and causing a substantial burden to the human operator due to the need to switch continuously from the manipulation of the arm to the control of the mobile platform. Hence, several works have consi…
Teleoperation permits to control robots from a safe distance while performing tasks in a remote environment. Kinematic differences between the input device and the remotely controlled manipulator or the existence of redundancy in the remote robot may pose challenges in moving intuitively the remote
Human Robot interaction is a fundamental perquisite for any robot performing a physical task in collaboration with a human. The presence of disturbances arising from the partially known tasks payloads, the unexpected interaction forces in general, and the uncertainty in the interpretation of the hum…
Despite the development of a large number of mobile manipulation robots, very few platforms can demonstrate the required strength and mechanical sturdiness to accommodate the needs of real-world applications with high payload and moderate/harsh physical interaction demands, e.g., in disaster-respons
This work introduces a framework for the Cartesian control of multi-legged, highly redundant robots. The proposed framework allows the untrained user to perform complex motion tasks with robotics platforms by leveraging a simple, auto-generated ROS-based interface. Contrary to other motion control f…
In this paper, we look at the challenge of human robot interaction in locomotion. We consider a hand-in-hand interaction scenario where a human compliantly interacts with the upper-body of an impedance controlled humanoid. By exploring the velocity transmission of the robot arms, and the interaction…
Complex interactions with unstructured environments require the application of appropriate restoring forces in response to the imposed displacements. Impedance control techniques provide effective solutions to achieve this, however, their quasi-static performance is highly dependent on the choice of…
This work presents a new attitude balancing strategy implemented and validated on a quadrupedal robot equipped with a custom hybrid wheel-legged mobility system. The proposed method uses an inverse kinematics solution scheme based on Quadratic Programming optimization to generate full body motions t…
Robotics teleoperation has been extensively studied and considered in the past in several task scenarios where direct human intervention is not possible due to the hazardous environments. In such applications, both communication degradation and reduced perception of the remote environment are practi…
In this work we introduced a prioritized Cartesian impedance control under the framework of the Quadratic Programming (QP) optimization. In particular, we present a formulation which is simpler than full inverse dynamics, avoids any matrix pseudo-inversion, inverse kinematics computation and conside…
We present a new method to translate videos to commands for robotic manipulation using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). Our framework first extracts deep features from the input video frames with a deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Two RNN layers with an encoder-decoder architecture are…
Limitations with the on-board computational resources installed on untethered robots such as humanoids and mobile robots in general affects significantly the performance and capabilities of these machines. An approach to address this issue is to make use of the cloud robotics concept and take advant…
Developing a high physical performance robotic manipulation platform with considerable power density, strength and resilience is not a trivial task and frequently leads to heavy and bulky systems unable to meet the application requirements, i.e. such robots should have human body size compatibility…