Alberto Parmiggiani

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Technologist at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

Research across sensory perception demonstrates remarkable similarities between vision and touch, particularly in how both modalities process motion. The retina and skin use two-dimensional receptor arrays to analyse spatiotemporal information for stimulus orientation and direction. In sensory cortices like MT (vision) and S1 (touch), neurons are t...

In neonates and children, stroke is one of the most frequent causes of child disability. Most of the interventions are based on traditional physiotherapy or non-technological devices. Recent studies have shown that when more sensory signals are available, our brain takes advantage of multisensory integration. We designed, developed, and validated w...

The current study presents the development and validation of a compliant Delta robot with a monolithic structure, which has been fabricated using additive manufacturing (AM). The monolithic design and the use of AM accelerate the robot development cycle by enabling rapid prototyping and deployment while also facilitating experimentation with novel...

Additive manufacturing builds physical objects by accumulating layers upon layers of solidified material. This process is typically done with horizontal planar layers. However, fused filament printers have the capability to extrude material along 3D curves. The idea of depositing out-of-plane, also known as non-planar printing, has spawned a trend...

This article focuses on enhancing the range of motion (ROM) of the Tetra II joint, a spherical compliant joint consisting of three internally interconnected tetrahedron-shaped elements that achieve motion through elastic deformation. Despite its excellent precision, this specific design is constrained in terms of ROM due to internal contacts among...

The manufacturing and assembly of small parallel mechanisms are often complex because of the required tolerances and high part count. The present work focuses on the use of additively manufactured compliant mechanisms to overcome some of these difficulties. As a reference, this work considers a recent work on a two degrees of freedom parallel orien...

This study presents the design and validation of a compliant Delta robot created through additive manufacturing (AM) with a monolithic structure. The use of AM expedites the development cycle of robots, enabling faster prototype development and deployment, as well as facilitating experimentation with new robot kinematics. The use of compliant joint...

In the industrial field, Additive Manufacturing is a production concept that is increasingly gaining ground. The secret of its success lies in its definition: being able to produce an object by the progressive deposition of material instead of its removal as for the traditional machining. In this way, problems such as waste quantities, complex geom...

In this article, we describe the design, fabrication, and validation of a push-latch gripper produced via additive manufacturing, which is capable of performing planar grasps of objects with two opposite parallel surfaces. In particular, the gripper modes of operation are presented, along with an efficient virtual prototype of the system based on a...

Robots are helping humans perform tasks, especially in industry. The collaboration between humans and machines is considered to be among the principal factors underlying the so called Industry 4.0 . To boost such a form of collaboration, robots could be provided with a higher degree of instrumentation, which undoubtedly resorts to a reliable sens...

p class="Abstract">The mine action community suffers from a lack of information sharing among stakeholders. Since 2004, Snail Aid has been working on Disarmadillo, a dramatic shift in paradigm: an open source hardware platform for humanitarian demining. Developed mainly thanks to volunteers’ work across more than 15 years, the machine is now going...

The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from the way natural cognitive systems—in humans, animals, and biological systems—develop intelligence by exploiting...

This experimental work focuses on the effect of various joint-design factors on the adhesive bonding of mixed short- (Onyx) and continuous-carbon-fiber reinforced Nylon-6 parts, 3D-printed via Fused Filament Fabrication technology. A low-pressure plasma treatment has been preliminarily performed to maximize the adhesion at the composite's surface-a...

The present work aims to introduce a novel robotic platform suitable for investigating perception in multi-sensory motion tasks for individuals with and without sensory and motor disabilities. The system, called RoMAT, allows the study of how multisensory signals are integrated, taking into account the speed and direction of the stimuli. It is a ro...

Free access at: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1cmlkWhrH6AbV This experimental work aims at evaluating the mechanical and failure behavior of adhesive-bonded single-lap joints made of a thermoplastic composite 3D-printed via Fused Filament Fabrication technology. Carbon fiber was selected as the reinforcement and used in the form of both short and...

Recent years have seen the wide diffusion of composite materials in many manufacturing fields and the rapid evolution of additive manufacturing. Lately, these technologies have been combined practically allowing the fabrication of continuous-fiber reinforced polymer parts via 3D-printing. This topic is gaining attention both in the research communi...

Tendon-driven mechanisms are gaining popularity in developing light weight, backdrivable robots for widespread use in safe human-robot collaborations. For such robots, appropriate tendon routing is essential to avoid any kinematic couplings. This article talks about the concept design and development of a novel tendon routing mechanism for 4 tendon...

This article provides a detailed comparative analysis of five orientational, two degrees of freedom (DOF) mechanisms whose envisioned application is the wrist of the iCub humanoid robot. Firstly, the current iCub mk.2 wrist implementation is presented, and the desired design objectives are proposed. Prominent architectures from literature such as t...

The evaluation of robotic hands is a subjectively biased, complex process. The fields pertaining to robotic hands are human-centric in nature, making human hands a good standard for benchmark comparisons of robotic hands. To achieve this, we propose a new evaluation index, where we evaluate robotic hands on three fronts: their form, features and pe...

Inspired by the biomechanical and passive properties of human muscles, we present a novel actuator named passive noise rejecting Variable Stiffness Actuator (pnrVSA). For a single actuated joint, the proposed design adopts two motor-gear groups in an agonist-antagonist configuration coupled to the joint via serial non-linear springs. From a mechani...

In order to reduce the share of the motive power required to drive the robot’s links, with the aim of increasing its payload-to-weight ratio, this article studies the best way to relocate the actuators (inertial load) but not complicate the joint kinematics. For this, several Parallel Kinematic Mechanisms (PKMs) were considered, namely a 4-UU mecha...

The payload-to-weight ratio is one of the most important metrics when designing robotic wrists. A solution to maximize it and to reduce the share of the motive power required to drive the robot's links is to employ parallel kinematic mechanisms (PKMs). Indeed PKMs allow relocating distal masses closer to the robot's base actually increasing the ove...

The evaluation of robotic hands is a subjectively biased, complex process. The fields pertaining to robotic hands are human-centric in nature, making human hands a good standard for benchmark comparisons of robotic hands. To achieve this, we propose a new evaluation index, where we evaluate robotic hands on three fronts: their form, features and pe...

N-UU class mechanisms, exemplified by the Omni-Wrist III, are compact parallel kinematic mechanisms (PKM) with large singularity free workspaces. These characteristics make them ideal for applications in robot wrists. This article presents the detailed kinematic and workspace analysis for four N-UU class mechanisms. More in detail, the equations de...

The design process of robotic faces as focal points of human-robot interactions plays a very important role in the construction of successful robot companions. The face of a robot represents an attentional anchor for the human user, and, if designed appropriately, enables a comfortable and intuitive communication. In this paper, we describe the use...

The last quarter of a century has seen a dramatic rise of interest in the development of technological solutions for visually impaired people. However, despite the presence of many devices, user acceptance is low. Not only are visually impaired adults not using these devices but they are also too complex for children. The majority of these devices...

Recent developments in human-robot interaction show how the ability to communicate with people in a natural way is of great importance for artificial agents. The implementation of facial expressions has been found to significantly increase the interaction capabilities of humanoid robots. For speech, displaying a correct articulation with sound is m...

Recently we proposed a novel principle to design variable stiffness actuators [1]. For a single actuated joint, the principle adopts two motors in agonist-antagonist configuration coupled to the joint via nonlinear springs. Co-activation (the simultaneous activation of both motors) increases both the joint stiffness and the joint passive noise reje...

Recent developments in human-robot interaction show how the ability to communicate with people in a natural way is of great importance for artificial agents. The implementation of facial expressions has been found to significantly increase the interaction capabilities of humanoid robots. For speech, displaying a correct articulation with sound is m...

Robotic technology has made significant progresses in the past years. Robots are now common in large manufacturing plants and other industrial settings, safely confined in closed work cells. But to be even more helpful, robots need the capability of interacting physically with humans, and with unstructured environments. This poses new challenges in...

In the last decade new actuator designs have been presented trying to introduce at mechanical level the advantages of compliance. Ranging from serial elastic actuators to different designs of variable stiffness actuators, various prototypes have been proposed and implemented on robots, thus allowing performance of novel and challenging tasks.Nevert...

Sensorimotor coordination in humanoid robots is the key to accomplish realistic human behavior. Paradigmatic tasks in sensorimotor coordination include force and impedance control, whole-body coordination during physical interaction with the environment, point-to-point reaching movements, and grasping visually identified objects. To tackle these pr...

In this paper we evaluate the benefits of series elastic actuation in performing a balancing task on a humanoid robot. By having the possibility to replace the type of transmission at the ankles level, it was possible to repeat the very same experiment in two different conditions: (1) Using series elastic actuators (SEA); (2) Replacing the elastic...

This article describes the hardware design of the iCub humanoid robot. The iCub is an open-source humanoid robotic platform designed explicitly to support research in embodied cognition. This paper covers the mechanical and electronic design of the first release of the robot. A series upgrades developed for the second version of the robot (iCub2),...

One of the most important features for a system capable of working in uncertain and unstructured environments is reliability. Nowadays robots are excellent machines, but are still not able to interact with their surrounding environment as humans or animals do. Recent studies highlight the role played by impedance changes in the human arm during man...

This article describes the design and testing process of a new pair of legs for the iCub. The iCub is an opensource humanoid robot that is being used by more than 20 institutes and research centers worldwide. Although the legs of the original iCub allow the robot to perform basic balancing and crawling locomotion the extension of its locomotion ski...

This paper describes the design and integration of three joint torque sensors on the arm of the iCub platform [1], [2]. The objective is to enhance the robot arm with joint torque control capability. This activity is part of a general upgrade of the humanoid robot to provide the entire 53 degree of freedom robot with low-level joint torque control....

This paper describes the design and realization of a force sensor and its use in the control of a human-like robotic neck actuated with tendons. The sensor is designed to have high sensitivity and to be robust to large loads. We use the sensor to control the force exerted by the tendons and realize a controller for the two degrees of freedom of the...