The main research topics are: control of manipulators with flexible elements (elastic joints, flexible links, variable stiffness actuation); hybrid force/velocity and impedance control of manipulators and aerial robots interacting with the environment; optimization schemes in kinematically redundant robots; motion planning for high-dimensional systems; motion planning and control of wheeled mobile robots and other nonholonomic mechanical systems; stabilization of underactuated robots; control-based motion planning for mobile manipulators; motion planning and control of locomotion in humanoid robots; sensor-based navigation and exploration in unknown environments; safe control of physical human-robot collaboration; sensory supervision of human-robot interaction; image-based visual servoing; control and visual servoing for unmanned aerial vehicles; multi-robot decentralized control, estimation, coordination and mutual localization.
Most of our research activities undergo experimental validation in the DIAG Robotics Lab. The current equipment consist of 6 articulated manipulators (a 6R Universal Robots UR10, a 7R Franka Emika Research 3, two 7R ABB single arm YuMi, a 7R KUKA LWR4 and a 6R KUKA KR5 industrial robot), 5 mobile robots (a TIAGo wheeled mobile manipulator with a 7 DoF arm by PAL Robotics, a OP3 small-size humanoid by ROBOTIS, a TITA wheeled legged robot by Direct Drive Tech, a Lite3 quadruped robot by Deep Robotics, and a G1 humanoid robot by Unitree robotics), 2 flying UAV (a Hummingbird and a Pelican quadrotor UAVs by AscTec), two haptic interfaces with 3D force feedback (Geomagic Touch), and an underactuated system (Pendubot by Quanser). These robots are equipped with sensing devices of various complexity, going from ultrasonic/laser range finders to cameras, and stereo vision systems. We have multiple RGB-D sensors, two 6D F/T sensors (Mini45 by ATI), and two HMDs (Oculus Rift). In the past, we have designed and built a two-link flexible manipulator (FlexArm) and a differentially-driven wheeled mobile robot (SuperMARIO).
