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Michele Focchi

16 accepted papers

2026

Smooth Human-Robot Shared Control for Autonomous Orchard Monitoring with UGVs (I)

Cheikh Melainine El Bou, Michele Focchi, Michael Chang, Marco Camurri, Karl Dietrich von Ellenrieder
ICRA 2026poster

Precision agriculture offers the opportunity to auto- mate routine or difficult tasks in orchards and vineyards, such as spraying or inspection, with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). In this context, human operators should be kept in the closed-loop control of the robot for safety and reliability. Th…

Cited by 0Scholar ↗
2023

CLIO: a Novel Robotic Solution for Exploration and Rescue Missions in Hostile Mountain Environments

Michele Focchi, Mohamed Bensaadallah, Marco Frego, Angelika Peer, Daniele Fontanelli, Andrea Del Prete +1
ICRA 2023poster

Rescue missions in mountain environments are hardly achievable by standard legged robots—because of the high slopes—or by flying robots—because of limited payload capacity. We present a concept for a rope-aided climbing robot which can negotiate up-to-vertical slopes and carry heavy payloads. The ro…

Cited by 7Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Reactive Landing Controller for Quadruped Robots

Francesco Roscia, Michele Focchi, Andrea Del Prete, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini
RA-L 2023

Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult when high horizontal velocities are involved. In this lette

Cited by 17Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Foothold Evaluation Criterion for Dynamic Transition Feasibility for Quadruped Robots

Luca Clemente, Octavio Villarreal, Angelo Bratta, Michele Focchi, Victor Barasuol, Giovanni Gerardo Muscolo +1
ICRA 2022poster

To traverse complex scenarios reliably a legged robot needs to move its base aided by the ground reaction forces, which can only be generated by the legs that are momentarily in contact with the ground. A proper selection of footholds is crucial for maintaining balance. In this paper, we propose a f…

Cited by 15Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

On the Hardware Feasibility of Nonlinear Trajectory Optimization for Legged Locomotion based on a Simplified Dynamics

Angelo Bratta, Romeo Orsolino, Michele Focchi, Victor Barasuol, Giovanni Gerardo Muscolo, Claudio Semini
ICRA 2020poster

Simplified models are useful to increase the computational efficiency of a motion planning algorithm, but their lack of accuracy have to be managed. We propose two feasibility constraints to be included in a Single Rigid Body Dynamics-based trajectory optimizer in order to obtain robust motions in c…

Cited by 14Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Fast and Continuous Foothold Adaptation for Dynamic Locomotion Through CNNs

Octavio Antonio Villarreal-Magaña, Victor Barasuol, Marco Camurri, Luca Franceschi, Michele Focchi, Massimiliano Pontil +2
RA-L 2019

Legged robots can outperform wheeled machines for most navigation tasks across unknown and rough terrains. For such tasks, visual feedback is a fundamental asset to provide robots with terrain awareness. However, robust dynamic locomotion on difficult terrains with real-time performance guarantees r

Cited by 81Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Passive Whole-Body Control for Quadruped Robots: Experimental Validation Over Challenging Terrain

Shamel Fahmi, Carlos Mastalli, Michele Focchi, Claudio Semini
RA-L 2019

We present experimental results using a passive whole-body control approach for quadruped robots that achieves dynamic locomotion while compliantly balancing the robot's trunk. We formulate the motion tracking as a quadratic program that takes into account the full robot rigid body dynamics, the act

Cited by 122Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Application of Wrench-Based Feasibility Analysis to the Online Trajectory Optimization of Legged Robots

Romeo Orsolino, Michele Focchi, Carlos Mastalli, Hongkai Dai, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini
RA-L 2018

Motion planning in multicontact scenarios has recently gathered interest within the legged robotics community, however actuator force/torque limits are rarely considered. We believe that these limits gain paramount importance when the complexity of the terrains to be traversed increases. We build on

Cited by 53Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Simultaneous Contact, Gait, and Motion Planning for Robust Multilegged Locomotion via Mixed-Integer Convex Optimization

Bernardo Aceituno-Cabezas, Carlos Mastalli, Hongkai Dai, Michele Focchi, Andreea Radulescu, Darwin G. Caldwell +4
RA-L 2018

Traditional motion planning approaches for multilegged locomotion divide the problem into several stages, such as contact search and trajectory generation. However, reasoning about contacts and motions simultaneously is crucial for the generation of complex whole-body behaviors. Currently, coupling

Cited by 170Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Heterogeneous Sensor Fusion for Accurate State Estimation of Dynamic Legged Robots

Simona Nobili, Marco Camurri, Victor Barasuol, Michele Focchi, Darwin Caldwell, Claudio Semini +1
RSS 2017poster

In this paper we present a system for the state estimation of a dynamically walking and trotting quadruped. The approach fuses four heterogeneous sensor sources (inertial, kinematic, stereo vision and LIDAR) to maintain an accurate and consistent estimate of the robot's base link velocity and positi…

Cited by 84Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Online payload identification for quadruped robots

Guido Tournois, Michele Focchi, Andrea Del Prete, Romeo Orsolino, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini
IROS 2017poster

The identification of inertial parameters is crucial to achieve high-performance model-based control of legged robots. The inertial parameters of the legs are typically not altered during expeditions and therefore are best identified offline. On the other hand, the trunk parameters depend on the mod…

Cited by 41Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Trajectory and foothold optimization using low-dimensional models for rough terrain locomotion

Carlos Mastalli, Michele Focchi, Ioannis Havoutis, Andreea Radulescu, Sylvain Calinon, Jonas Buchli +2
ICRA 2017poster

We present a trajectory optimization framework for legged locomotion on rough terrain. We jointly optimize the center of mass motion and the foothold locations, while considering terrain conditions. We use a terrain costmap to quantify the desirability of a foothold location. We increase the gait's…

Cited by 108Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Viscosity-based height reflex for workspace augmentation for quadrupedal locomotion on rough terrain

Michele Focchi, Roy Featherstone, Romeo Orsolino, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini
IROS 2017poster

We propose a reactive locomotion strategy, called height reflex, that is useful to address big elevation changes in the terrain (e.g. when a quadruped robot has to step down from a high platform). In these cases the swing leg can lose mobility creating issues in the subsequent steps. The height refl…

Cited by 14Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Hierarchical planning of dynamic movements without scheduled contact sequences

Carlos Mastalli, Ioannis Havoutis, Michele Focchi, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini
ICRA 2016

Most animal and human locomotion behaviors for solving complex tasks involve dynamic motions and rich contact interaction. In fact, complex maneuvers need to consider dynamic movement and contact events at the same time. We present a hierarchical trajectory optimization approach for planning dynamic

Cited by 36Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Towards a multi-legged mobile manipulator

Bilal Ur Rehman, Michele Focchi, Jinoh Lee, Houman Dallali, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini
ICRA 2016

A common disadvantage of multi-legged robots is that they often lack the manipulation capability. To overcome this limitation, an arm can be added to the body of the multi-legged robot, to perform manipulation tasks and provide assistance for locomotion. First, we proposed an attachment configuratio

Cited by 73Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Planning and execution of dynamic whole-body locomotion for a hydraulic quadruped on challenging terrain

Alexander W. Winkler, Carlos Mastalli, Ioannis Havoutis, Michele Focchi, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini
ICRA 2015poster

We present a framework for dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain, where the choice of appropriate footholds is crucial for the success of the behaviour. We build a model of the environment on-line and on-board using an efficient occupancy grid representation. We use Any-time-Repair…

Cited by 166Source ↗Scholar ↗