Robotics Goes PRISMA – a seminar with Prof. Bruno Siciliano (UNINA)

Robotics Goes PRISMA – a seminar with Prof. Bruno Siciliano (UNINA)

Date: Friday 11 March 2022
Time: 16:00
Place: Aula Verde, Dip. Informatica
Speaker: Prof. Bruno Siciliano – PRISMA Lab
Department of Electrical Engineering & Information Technology – University of Naples Federico II

Contact Person: P. Fiorini

ABSTRACT

The PRISMA Lab www.prisma.unina.it has been engaged in robotics research at University of Naples Federico II for more than 30 years. This talk will survey our most remarkable achievements in seven research areas where robot manipulation and control challenges are found: grasping and manipulation, handling and manipulation, dynamic manipulation, aerial manipulation, interaction with deformable objects, human–robot interaction, and haptic shared control.

BIO

To present Bruno Siciliano, Professor of Robotics and Director of ICAROS Center at University of Naples Federico II, and Past President of IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, one cannot overlook what is his background: the city of Naples and the reckless passion for Napoli soccer team. It then happens that the background comes to the fore and becomes for the robotics expert at an international level a turning point. Like when, having earned his PhD degree, he decided to build his academic future in his city and for his city, declining a faculty position at a prestigious American university, (also) because of the football faith that has always accompanied him in the team’s highs (those were the times of Maradona) and lows. His book Robotics is among the most adopted texts in universities around the world, even though when he talks about his academic achievements there is the impressive Springer Handbook of Robotics, the reference manual for robotics at international level, edited with Professor Oussama Khatib, which he defines as “the most exciting professional experience of my life”. A work of coordination of over 200 renowned researchers, with the goal (fulfilled) of offering a unique tool to the scientific community of robotics and beyond. His research group at PRISMA Lab has had more than 20 projects funded by the European Union for a total of 18 million euros in the last 15 years, including an Advanced Grant from the RoDyMan, an acronym for “Robotic Dynamic Manipulation”, a robot capable of replicating the movements of a pizza maker. In terms of scientific research, it constituted the challenge of creating an automaton capable of manipulating deformable, elastic, non-solid objects, such as water and flour dough. “Keep the gradient” is the motto that Siciliano invented, meaning a constant search for new ideas and new solutions. A hymn to complexity to capture challenges and opportunities always in the name of the art of work & play, as stated in his passionate TEDx Talk.

 

More details are available at http://wpage.unina.it/sicilian/ and https://www.ipr.kit.edu/english/staff_3343.php

Cognitive robotics and embedded AI for minimally invasive surgery – a seminar with Prof Franziska Mathis-Ullrich (KIT)

Cognitive robotics and embedded AI for minimally invasive surgery – a seminar with Prof Franziska Mathis-Ullrich (KIT)

Date: Friday 11 March 2022
Time: 11:00
Place: Aula Verde, Dip. Informatica
Speaker: Prof Franziska Mathis-Ullrich -Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Contact Person: P. Fiorini

ABSTRACT

While human interaction remains key to a caring treatment, medical robotics holds the potential to improve surgical processes through enabling scaling of forces and actuation, providing safe and individual treatments to patients, and allowing for efficient use of health care personnel and resources. Machine learning algorithms and standardization of processes can increase the quality of medical diagnosis and treatments, particularly when analyzing large quantities of data. Technical and robotic systems can thus support the medical staff in all steps of a medical process.
This talk introduces several assistive robotic systems for minimally invasive surgical procedures being researched at the Health Robotics and Automation Lab at KIT, Germany. On one hand, we will discuss steerable flexible robotic tools for medical applications that require delicate tissue handling. On the other hand, cognitive robotic surgeons and augmented reality support in the operation room are presented for application in laparoscopy and neurosurgery.

Source: ClicKIT Magazine

BIO

Franziska Mathis-Ullrich is Assistant Professor for Medical Robotics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. Her primary research focus is on minimally invasive and cognition controlled robotic systems and embedded machine learning with emphasis on applications in surgery. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in mechanical engineering and robotics in 2009 and 2012 and obtained her Ph.D. in 2017 in Microrobotics from ETH Zurich, respectively. Since 2019, she has been an Assistant Professor with the Health Robotics and Automation Laboratory at KIT. Prof. Mathis-Ullrich is vice-president of the German Society for Computer- and Robot-assisted Surgery (CURAC) and has received the IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Medical Robotics (2014), the IEEE BioRob Best Student Paper Award (2016) and won twice with her team the first prize of the ICRA Microassembly Challenge (2014 & 2015). Furthermore, she made it onto the prestigious Forbes “30 under 30” list (2017).

Locomotion strategies for quadruped robots – a seminar with Michele Focchi

Locomotion strategies for quadruped robots – a seminar with Michele Focchi

Date: 7 december 2018
Time: 11:00
Place: Aula Verde, Dip. Informatica
Speaker: Michele Focchi – IIT Genova

Contact Person: P. Fiorini

ABSTRACT

Legged robots are mainly designed to traverse unstructured environments where wheeled robots have limited mobility. Their applications range from nuclear decommissioning to mining, search and rescue, inspection and surveillance. In addition, they can be applied to flank human workers (or collaborate with them) in order to reduce labor accidents, as well as in elderly care. The next generation of legged robots are envisioned to operate either autonomously or semi-autonomously (through tele-operation) over uneven terrains. This requires the rejection and compensation of disturbances, the exploitation of visual feedback, and the ability to manipulate both fragile and heavy objects. The main ingredients for legged locomotion are planning, control, perception and state estimation. Numerical optimization is a promising tool for motion planning and control for legged robotic systems in complex geometry environments (e.g. multi-contact scenarios) because it enables to push the machine up to the performance limits.

Indeed, when the complexity of the terrain increases, or when the execution of the requested task involves highly dynamic motions, numerical optimization and machine learning strategies are needed to automatically find feasible trajectories and control actions that could not otherwise be determined. In this seminar I will mainly focus on the planning aspects and on different strategies to achieve effective locomotion across complex terrain.

BIO

Michele Focchi is currently a Researcher at the DLS team in IIT. He received both the Bsc. and the Msc. in Control System Engineering from Politecnico di Milano.
After gaining some R&D experience in the industry, in 2009 he joined IIT where he developed a micro-turbine for which he obtained an international patent and a prize.In 2013, he got a PhD in robotics, getting involved in the Hydraulically Actuated Quadruped Robot (HyQ) project.
He initially was developing torque controllers for locomotion purposes, subsequently he moved to higher level (whole-body) controllers and model identification. He was also investigating locomotion strategies that are robust to uncertainties and work reliably on the real platform. Currently his research interests are focused on pushing the performances of quadruped robots in traversing unstructured environments, by using optimization-based planning strategies to perform dynamic motion planning.

https://www.iit.it/people/michele-focchi

Seminar with Michele Guarnieri

Seminar with Michele Guarnieri

Robotic Solutions for Infrastructure Predictive Maintenance – A seminar by Michele Guarnieri – Co-Founder of HiBot Corporation

Date: 7 december 2018
Time: 11:00
Place: Aula Verde, Dip. Informatica

HiBot Corporation, since its establishment, has been committed to the development of practical robotic solutions for extreme environments.
It is now engaging in the development of products for performing dangerous jobs, such as inspections where human should not or cannot go. The use of robots, not only can make the operator’s working environment safer, but can also lead to a higher level of efficiency and reliability of inspection and data collection, which is used for preventive/predictive maintenance of infrastructures.
In his talk, Michele Guarnieri, will be presenting several robotic developments with showing videos and photos of each system.

See also: Interview at Il sole 24 Ore

Michele Guarnieri is the co-founder and executive director at HiBot Corporation. He received his “Laurea” degree in Computer Science from the University of Verona (Italy) in 2000. He moved to Japan in 2001 at Tokyo Institute of Technology with the Prof. Hirose Laboratory. There he received the MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering respectively in 2004 and 2007. After establishing HiBot Corporation, some of his projects were awarded with the Robot Award from the Japanese Ministry of Economy (2010), the Edison Gold Award (2015), the World Economic Forum’s selection of Technology Pioneer (2015) and the IEEE Inaba Innovation Technology award in 2017.