Fabio Ruggiero

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Naples Federico II

This paper presents feedback stabilization control of a rolling manipulation system called the disk-on-disk. The system consists of two disks in which the upper disk (object) is free to roll on the lower disk (hand) under the influence of gravity. The goal is to stabilize the object at the unstable upright position directly above the hand. We show...

A new method to catch a thrown ball with a robot endowed with an eye-in-hand monocular visual system integrated into a gripper is proposed. As soon as the thrown ball is recognized by the visual system, the camera carried by the robot end-effector is forced to follow a baseline in the space so as to acquire an initial dataset of visual measurements...

A passivity-based control of Vertical Take-off and Landing (VToL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is presented in this paper. An estimator of unmodeled dynamics and external wrench (forces plus moments) acting on the aerial vehicle and based on the momentum of the system is employed to compensate such disturbances effects. This arrangement allows V...

This article proposes a shared-control teleoperation architecture for robot manipulators transporting an object on a tray. Differently from many existing studies about remotely operated robots with firm grasping capabilities, we consider the case in which, in principle, the object can break its contact with the robot end-effector. The proposed shar...

This paper presents an estimator of external disturbances for legged robots, based on the system's momentum. The estimator, along with a suitable motion planner for the trajectory of the robot's center of mass and an optimization problem based on the modulation of ground reaction forces, devises a whole-body controller for the robot. The designed s...

Performing inspection and maintenance tasks with aerial robots in complex industrial facilities requires high levels of maneuverability and dexterity. As full autonomy still struggles to provide robust solutions due to limited adaptability and high development costs, this study explores the paradigm shift towards shared control teleoperation for ti...

Humans process significantly more information through the sense of touch than through vision. Consequently, haptics for telemanipulation is poised to become essential in the coming years, as it offers operators an additional sensory channel crucial for interpretation in extreme conditions. However, current haptic device setups are either difficult...

The paper introduces a novel framework for safe and autonomous aerial physical interaction in industrial settings. It comprises two main components: a neural network-based target detection system enhanced with edge computing for reduced onboard computational load, and a control barrier function (CBF)-based controller for safe and precise maneuverin...

This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position control for force interaction and various other aerial manipulation tasks. The robotic arm, structured as a cl...

Fully actuated aerial robot proved their superiority for Aerial Physical Interaction (APhI) over the past years. This work proposes a minimal setup for aerial telemanipulation, enhancing accessibility of these technologies. The design and the control of a 6-DoF joystick with 4-DoF haptic feedback is detailed. It is the first haptic device with stan...

Fast detection of motor failures is crucial for multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) safety. It is well established in the literature that UAVs can adopt fault-tolerant control strategies to fly even when losing one or more rotors. We present a motor fault detection and isolation (FDI) method for multi-rotor UAVs based on an external wrench es...

This paper introduces a refined iteration of the PX4 autopilot firmware tailored to support developers in integrating bespoke control algorithms alongside the existing control framework. The proposed methodology employs a template-driven approach and introduces two novel control modules, thereby enabling users to harness all firmware functionalitie...

This paper introduces a novel hybrid force/position control system tailored for aerial manipulators, aiming to enable efficient and sustained delivery of horizontal forces. Unlike existing approaches mainly designed for ground-fixed manipulators, this architecture is specifically developed for aerial robotics. By leveraging physics-engine-based sim...

In this article, we review the main results achieved by the research activities carried out at PRISMA Lab of the University of Naples Federico II where, for 35 years, an interdisciplinary team of experts developed robots that are ultimately useful to humans. We summarize the key contributions made in the last decade in the six research areas of dyn...

This work presents a new formulation of the integral interconnection and damping-assignment passivity-based control methodology for underactuated mechanical systems subject to both matched and unmatched disturbances, either constant or position-dependent. The new controller is also applicable to systems with non-constant input matrix. Simulations r...

This chapter investigates the problem of an aerial manipulator interacting with the environment. The chapter is split into two parts. The former considers an aerial device with tilting propellers that, thanks to a super-twisting slide mode controller, can control the interaction force for inspection task purposes. The latter proposes a hardware-in-...

This article proposes a model predictive non-sliding manipulation (MPNSM) control approach to safely transport an object on a tray-like end-effector of a robotic manipulator. For the considered non-prehensile transportation task to succeed, both non-sliding manipulation and the robotic system constraints must always be satisfied. To tackle this pro...

Quadruped robots have garnered significant attention in recent years due to their ability to navigate through challenging terrains. Among the various environments, agriculture fields are particularly difficult for legged robots, given the variability of soil types and conditions. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel navigation strateg...

This work proposes an operational space control framework for non-prehensile object transportation using a robot arm. The control actions for the manipulator are computed by solving a quadratic programming problem considering the object's and manipulator's kinematic and dynamic constraints. Given the desired transportation trajectory, the proposed...

This paper devises a framework to control a quadruped robot tethered to a visually impaired person. The whole-body control of the quadruped robot does not exploit any force sensor. It makes use of two observers: the former for the estimation of the wrench applied on the robot's centre of mass, which is in turn used to handle the human-robot estimat...

This document revises the latest results related to robotic non-prehensile object transportation. The problem consists of a robotic arm transporting an object along the desired trajectory on a tray, guaranteeing a sticking behaviour and other constraints. The solution in [1], where an optimal control problem has been devised, is revised together wi...

Robotic systems are starting to be used not only within industrial environments but also in the agricultural field. To meet the increasing requirements of optimising monitoring and management, automation in the livestock field has noticeably increased in the last few years. However, robotics solutions still need to find their space in this field. I...

Energy grids represent a fundamental infrastructure of any country. These structures consist of many kilometres of power lines that must be periodically inspected and maintained. Among the necessary operations are installing and removing bird diverters to reduce bird strikes on power lines. These devices are intended to improve birds’ detection of...

This paper addresses the problem of robustly controlling an actively tilting quadrotor UAV. The proposed technique is model-free and it is based on hyperbolic functions of the six-dimensional pose error of the UAV with respect to the world reference frame; this hyperbolic controller globally attracts the error signals to an ultimate bound about the...

This paper presents a robust control strategy for controlling the flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a passively (fixed) tilted hexarotor. The proposed controller is based on a robust extended-state observer to estimate and reject internal dynamics and external disturbances at runtime. Both the stability and convergence of the observer...

This paper addresses the problem of transporting a rigid box filled with unknown objects with a dual-arm robotic system. Enforcing non-sliding contact behavior, which guarantees the transportation of the box despite the unknown load's action, is the main difficulty in this setting. To solve this problem, we propose a high-level model-predictive con...

This paper presents a novel energy shaping-based integral action for mechanical systems with unknown dissipative forces and matched disturbances. The proposed approach builds on the simultaneous interconnection and damping assignment method and takes advantage of the representation of the dissipative forces in the port-Hamiltonian dynamics. We cons...

This paper tackles the problem of nonprehensile object transportation through a legged manipulator. A whole-body control architecture is devised to prevent sliding of the object placed on the tray at the manipulator's end-effector and retain the legged robot balance during walking. The controller solves a quadratic optimization problem to realize t...

A legged robot needs to move in unstructured environments continuously subject to disturbances. Existing disturbance observers are not enough when significant forces act on both the center of mass and the robot's legs, and they usually employ indirect measures of the floating base's velocity. This paper presents a solution combining a momentum-base...

Robotic systems are gradually replacing human intervention in dangerous facilities to improve human safety and prevent risky situations. In this domain, our work addresses the problem of autonomous crossing narrow passages in a semi- structured (i.e., partially-known) environment. In particular, we focus on the CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron parti...

Stabilising an inverted pendulum on a cart is a well-known control problem. This paper proposes the mechanical and control design for solving the oscillation problem of a variable-length flexible beam mounted on a mobile robot. The system under consideration is the robot PovRob, used at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) for visu...

This paper investigates the connection between non-prehensile manipulation, specifically juggling, and legged locomotion, focusing on biped robots. In this direction, the hybrid nature of juggler robot dynamics and biped robots, the zero moment point stability, and the non-prehensile dynamic grasping conditions are provided and analysed. The simila...

Materials like fluids are long since important research objects of continuum mechanics as well as of computer graphics. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics(SPH) is one of the representation methods employed for continuous materials. Its simplicity in implementation and its realistic representation are drastically improved during the last decades. More...

The sliding primitive is a ubiquitous nonprehensile manipulation task, generally performed by mechanical systems represented by underactu-ated nonlinear models. A literature review of the recent works dealing with this task is first introduced. Then, a particular nonprehensile manipulation task that has arisen in the framework of the RoDyMan projec...

In this chapter, the design of nonlinear controllers for non-prehensile holonomic rolling system is reviewed. A general model for the class of non-prehensile rolling system considered in this work is first formulated. Then, both the input-state linearisation approach and the interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control technique f...

This chapter reviews the problem of nonholonomic rolling in non-prehensile manipulation tasks through two challenging and illustrative examples: the robotic hula-hoop and the ballbot system. The hula-hoop consists of an actuated stick and an unactuated hoop. First, the corresponding kine-matic model is derived. Second, the dynamic model is derived...

In this chapter, autonomous pizza tossing and catching is achieved. Under the assumption that some fingers grasp the pizza dough with soft contact , the grasp constraints are formulated and used to derive the individual and combined Euler-Lagrange dynamic equations of motion of the robotic manipulator and the dough. In particular, the dynamics of t...

Stretching a pizza dough with a rolling pin is a nonprehensile manipulation. Since the object is deformable, force closure cannot be established , and the manipulation is carried out in a nonprehensile way. The framework of this pizza dough stretching application that is explained in this chapter consists of four sub-procedures: (i) recognition of...

This paper presents a passivity-based control strategy dealing with underactuated two-degree-of-freedom (2-DoF) mechanical systems. Such a methodology, which is based on the interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control (IDA-PBC), rooted within the port-controlled Hamiltonian framework, can be applied to a very large class of under...

This paper addresses the robust control problem of mechanical systems with hybrid dynamics in port-Hamiltonian form. It is assumed that only the position states are measurable, and time-delay and saturation constraint affect the control signal. An extended state observer is designed after a coordinate transformation. The effect of the time delay in...

A hardware-in-the-loop simulator for human co-operation with an aerial manipulator is presented in this paper.The simulator provides the user with realistic haptic feedbackproper of a human-aerial manipulator interaction activity. Theforces exchanged between the hardware interface and the hu-man/environment are measured and supplied to a dynamicall...

This paper considers the problem of characterizing the quality of a contact configuration with respect to a planar pushing manipulation task, which represents a common non-prehensile manipulation primitive. In particular, a series of indices are proposed as a suitable characterization and are evaluated against metrics expressing both the energy eff...

This paper addresses the robust gait control for planar and passive biped robots using approaches based on energy properties. Energy pumping-and-damping passivity-based control is used to increase the robustness against uncertainties on the initial conditions of the passive gait exhibited by planar biped robots. The stability analysis is carried ou...

In this paper, disturbance reconstruction and robust trajectory tracking control of biped robots with hybrid dynamics in the port-Hamiltonian form is investigated. A new type of Hamiltonian function is introduced, which ensures the finite-time stability of the closed-loop system. The proposed control system consists of two loops: an inner and an ou...

In this paper, disturbance reconstruction and robust trajectory tracking control of biped robots with hybrid dynamics in the port-Hamiltonian form is investigated. A new type of Hamiltonian function is introduced, which ensures the finite-time stability of the closed-loop system. The proposed control system consists of two loops: an inner and an ou...

This chapter can be considered a tutorial to guide the readers toward the implemen- tation of active fault-tolerant control systems dealing with the damage of a propeller of an unmanned aerial vehicle. The addressed aerial device is a quadrotor with fixed propellers. The presented methodology also supposes to turn off the motor, the oppo- site of t...

A compass-like biped robot can go down a gentle slope without the need of actuation through a proper choice of its dynamic parameter and starting from a suitable initial condition. Addition of control actions is requested to generate additional gaits and robustify the existing one. This paper designs an interconnection and damping assignment passiv...

This paper proposes a technique to manipulate an object with a nonholonomic mobile robot by pushing, which is a nonprehensile manipulation motion primitive. Such a primitive involves unilateral constraints associated with the friction between the robot and the manipulated object. Violating this constraint produces the slippage of the object during...

This paper proposes a technique to manipulate an object with a nonholonomic mobile robot by pushing, which is a nonprehensile manipulation motion primitive. Such a primitive involves unilateral constraints associated with the friction between the robot and the manipulated object. Violating this constraint produces the slippage of the object during...

The extensive distribution of collaborative robots in industrial workplaces allows human operators to decrease the weight and the repetitiveness of their activities. In order to facilitate the role of the human worker during the interaction with these robots, innovative control paradigms, enabling an intuitive human-robot collaborative manipulation...

This chapter aims the broadcasting of the results achieved by the RoDyMan project about the task planning manipulation of deformable objects, and the nonprehensile manipulation control. The final demonstrator of the project is a pizza-making process. After an introduction to the general topic of nonprehensile manipulation, the mechatronic design an...

This work addresses the problem of gait generation in underactuated compass-like biped robots using dissipative forces in the controller. Three different controllers are presented. The first one is a simultaneous interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control with dissipative forces. The second one is an energy pumping-and-damping c...

This paper tackles the problem of suppressing vibrations of a flexible beam mounted on a mobile robot for inspection purposes. The adopted approach is an input shaper design along with Bayesian optimization. The latter methodology is employed to find out the optimal shaping parameter, taking into account non-ideal behaviors as controller hysteresis...

This letter addresses the task of stabilizing a wheeled unmanned aerial vehicle on a pipe, which is an emerging application in oil and gas facilities for nondestructive measurements. After the derivation of the dynamic model of the system, a discrete-time nonlinear model predictive controller is designed over a finite horizon. The analysis of the a...

Wheel slip may cause a significative worsening of control performance during the movement of a mobile robot. A method to avoid wheel slip is proposed in this paper through a nonlinear model predictive control. The constraints included within the optimization problem limit the force exchanged between each wheel and the ground. The approach is valida...

A nonprehensile manipulation system consisting of a dexterous plate (e.g., a peel) which is intended to induce a rotating movement on a disk (e.g., a pizza) is studied. A dynamic model based on the Euler-Lagrange equations is first derived. Then, a controllability analysis of this model is carried out, which shows some intrinsic limitations of the...

Aerial Robotic Manipulators can be controlled either in a centralized or decentralized way. This Part of the book addresses the latter option, in which the aerial platform and the arm are controlled separately in a robust way to counteract the reciprocal disturbances. An estimator of such disturbances, based on the momentum of the system and acting...

This paper presents a new procedure to design a control law using the classical interconnection and damping assignment technique within the passivity-based port-Hamiltonian framework. The sought goal is to reduce the complexity of solving the so-called matching equations. The proposed approach is applied to two case studies of planar rolling nonpre...

This paper presents the control of a translational oscillator with a rotational actuator (TORA) system, in full gravity, through the interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control (IDA-PBC). The sought goal is to control the underactuated TORA system while reducing the complexity in solving the partial differential equations coming...

This paper presents a suitable solution to control the pose of the end-effector of a redundant robot along a pre-planned trajectory, while addressing an active compliant behaviour in the null-space. The orientation of the robot is expressed through a singularity-free represen- tation form. To accomplish the task, no exteroceptive sensor is needed....

Wheel slip may cause a significative worsening of control performance during the movement of a mobile robot. A method to avoid wheel slip is proposed in this paper through a nonlinear model predictive control. The constraints included within the optimization problem limit the force exchanged between each wheel and the ground. The approach is valida...

Nonprehensile dynamic manipulation can be reasonably considered as the most complex manipulation task. It might be argued that such a task is still rather far from being fully solved and applied in robotics. This survey tries to collect the results reached so far by the research community about planning and control in the nonprehensile dynamic mani...

Three new image-based visual-impedance control laws are proposed in this paper allowing physical interaction of a dual-arm unmanned aerial manipulator fitted with a camera and a force/torque sensor. Namely, two first-order impedance behaviors are achieved based on the transpose and the inverse of the system Jacobian matrix, respectively, while a se...

Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatility and the agility of some aerial platforms with the precision and the dexterity of robotic arms. This letter tries to collect the results reached by the research community so far within the field of aerial manipulation, specially from the technological and control point of view. A brief literature...

A method to reconfigure in a nonprehensile way the pose (position and orientation) of a sphere rolling on a plate is proposed in this letter. The nonholonomic nature of the task is first solved at a planning level, where a geometric technique is employed to derive a Cartesian path to steer the sphere towards the arbitrarily desired pose. Then, an i...

The International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR) is an annual meeting that brings together academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects related to the introduction of robots into everyday life. HFR collects contributions on current developments of a new...

The papers in this special section focus on aerial manipulation which is intended as grasping, positioning, assembling and disassembling of mechanical parts, measurement instruments and any other kind of objects, performed by a flying robot equipped with arms and grippers. Aerial manipulators can be helpful in those industrial and service applicati...