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Francesco Di Corato

Francesco Di Corato
University of Pisa | UNIPI · Interdepartmental Centre for Bioengineering and Robotics Research “E. Piaggio”

PhD

About

42
Publications
6,996
Reads
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467
Citations
Additional affiliations
August 2012 - February 2015
University of Pisa
Position
  • Research Associate
Description
  • Aided Inertial Navigation; Robust Visual & Visual-Inertial Navigation; Computer Vision; Robust Bayesian filtering; Guidance and Control of autonomous vehicles; Entropy-based estimation and exploration; System Identification and Control;
Education
January 2009 - June 2013
University of Pisa
Field of study
  • Automation, Robotics and Bioengineering
March 2005 - October 2008
University of Pisa
Field of study
  • Automation and Robotics Engineering

Publications

Publications (42)
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, a novel, robust, and simple method for automatically estimating the hand pose is proposed and validated. The method uses a multi-camera optoelectronic system and a model-based stochastic algorithm. The approach is marker-based and relies on an Unscented Kalman Filter. A hand kinematic model is introduced for constraining relative mar...
Article
Full-text available
A cooperative navigation procedure for a team of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is described and validated on experimental data. The procedure relies on acoustic communication networking among the AUVs and/or fixed acoustic nodes, and it is suitable as a low-cost solution for team navigation. Embedding the acoustic localization measurements...
Article
Robust and performing navigation systems for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) play a discriminant role towards the success of complex underwater missions involving one or more AUVs. The quality of the filtering algorithm for the estimation of the AUV navigation state strongly affects the performance of the overall system. In this paper, the au...
Article
This work aims at proposing a method for building a map of a priori percentage density of expected findings over an area from historical qualitative information and at defining a cooperative distributed exploration algorithm guided by the minimization of the information gain over the a priori map. The exploration algorithm is implemented by partiti...
Article
This paper presents two acoustic-based techniques for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) navigation within an underwater network of fixed sensors. The proposed algorithms exploit the positioning measurements provided by an Ultra-Short Base Line (USBL) transducer on-board the vehicle to aid the navigation task. In the considered framework the acous...
Conference Paper
This paper proposes a Bayesian set-based estimator applied to the adaptive mapping of objects resting on the seabed, through the design and the implementation of a Gaussian Mixture - Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-PHD) filter. Starting from the noisy measures provided by an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) equipped with side-scan sonar, the...
Conference Paper
Currently, many important scientific and industrial activities in the underwater environment are based on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). The complexity and the accuracy required by these tasks highlight the need for accurate, reliable and robust navigation strategies. A key aspect for such missions is the availability of an accurate algorit...
Conference Paper
Developing reliable navigation strategies is mandatory in the field of Underwater Robotics and in particular for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to ensure the correct achievement of a mission. Underwater navigation is still nowadays critical, e.g. due to lack of access to satellite navigation systems (e.g. the Global Positioning System, GPS):...
Conference Paper
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly employed in underwater operations within many scientific and industrial tasks (e.g. Oil&Gas operations, exploration and surveillance of archaeological sites, reconnaissance and patrolling for military operations). Autonomous underwater navigation is critical due to lack of access to satellite n...
Conference Paper
The proposed work is in the framework of the V-Fides project, in which is a general purpose, 3000m depth rated underwater vehicle with highly maneuverability capabilities was developed. The project was co-funded by Tuscany Region (Italy) and developed by a team lead by WASS S.p.A. (Whitehead Sistemi Subacquei, Livorno) with the participation of sev...
Conference Paper
This paper describes a nonlinear complementary filter capable of estimating the course motion variables namely the position, velocity, heading and accelerometers bias of an agile, over-actuated AUV during underwater operations, using the inertial sensors (IMU), the DVL, the depth sensor and the compass. The proposed work is within the framework of...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The adoption of fault detection and isolation (FDI) techniques is fundamental to ensure high levels of safety and productivity, especially in critical and expensive applications like Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). This paper describes a comparison between different techniques available in the literature, applied to over-actuated AUVs under s...
Conference Paper
The proposed work aims to describe the “V-FIDES” project, focused on developing a new generation of agile, over-actuated, long endurance Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, for deep underwater exploration, operation and environmental monitoring. The project, co-funded by Tuscany Region (Italy), has been developed by a team lead by WASS S.p.A. (Whitehea...
Conference Paper
In this paper, the authors present an underwater navigation system for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) which exploits measurements from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a Pressure Sensor (PS) for depth and the Global Positioning System (GPS, used during periodic and dedicated resurfacings) and relies on either the Extended Kalman Filter (E...
Article
The proposed work is in the framework of the V-Fides project, aiming at developing a new generation of agile, over-actuated, long endurance Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, for deep underwater exploration, operation and monitoring. The project is co-funded by Tuscany Region (Italy) and is developed by a team lead by WASS S.p.A. (Whitehead Sistemi Su...
Chapter
This paper describes a loosely coupled approach for the improvement of state estimation in autonomous inertial navigation, using image-based relative motion estimation for augmentation. The augmentation system uses a recently proposed pose estimation technique based on a Entropy-Like cost function, which was proven to be robust to the presence of n...
Conference Paper
An algorithmic framework and experimental results on acoustic self-localization and mapping for an AUV equipped with an USBL modem are reported. The methodology proposed is quite general and applicable to a wide range of AUV and of navigation needs; however, the results presented refer to the Typhoon AUV and to the experimental configuration as ava...
Conference Paper
A mixed USBL / LBL acoustic navigation system has been experimentally tested in the framework of the CommsNet 13 sea trial, organized and led by CMRE in September 2013. The system set-up included a “Typhoon” AUV, equipped with a USBL/acoustic modem transducer, and a set of acoustic modems anchored at the bottom. The navigation procedure tested cons...
Conference Paper
The CommsNet 2013 experiment took place in September 2013 in the La Spezia Gulf, North Tyrrhenian Sea. Organized and scienti�cally led by the NATO S&T Org. Ctr. for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE, formerly NURC), with the participation of several research institutions, the experiment included among its objectives the evaluation of on-b...
Conference Paper
The experimental results in acoustic communication and localization obtained with the “Typhoon” Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) in the CommsNet13 field trial are presented. The “Typhoon”s are a set of three AUVs developed by the Authors within the framework of the “Thesaurus” project, funded by the Tuscany Region, aiming at developing technique...
Conference Paper
The Thesaurus project, funded by the Tuscany Region, had among its goals the development of technologies and methodologies for archaeological search with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles working as a team in exploration missions. This has led to the design and realization of a new AUV class, the Typhoon, on the basis of the archaeological requirement...
Conference Paper
Experimental results obtained with the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles developed in the “Thesaurus” project are reported. The Thesaurus AUVs, “Typhoon”, are low-cost torpedo-shaped 300 m depth-rated vehicles implementing a distributed communication and localization scheme based on acoustic modems, one of them with Ultra Short Base Line (USBL) capabi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The paper presents some experimental results of autonomous underwater navigation, based on the fusion of acoustic and inertial measurements. The work is in the framework of the Thesaurus project, funded by the Tuscany Region, aiming at developing techniques for systematic exploration of marine areas of archaeological interest through a team of Auto...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Patient performance assessment should be as much as possible precise and independent from the examiner subjective judgment in order to evaluate therapy efficacy in restoring impaired sensori-motor functions. In this paper, a method for continuously monitoring patient activity in order to correct wrong movements and to follow patient improvements is...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The wrist plays a fundamental role in reaching and grasping actions, i.e. it guides the hand to the grasp position and adjusts its orientation on the basis of the grasping type and task. This paper proposes a novel, low-cost method for wrist pose estimation by using the Asus Xtion Pro Live motion sensing device and a robust marker-based tracking ap...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
During a rehabilitation session, patient activity should be continuously monitored in order to correct wrong movements and to follow patient improvements. Therefore, the application of human motion tracking techniques to rehabilitation is finding more and more consensus. The aim of this paper is to propose a novel, low-cost method for hand pose est...
Conference Paper
This contribution presents a constraints-based loosely-coupled Augmented Implicit Kalman Filter approach to vision-aided inertial navigation that uses epipolar constraints as output map. The proposed approach is capable of estimating the standard navigation output (ve- locity, position and attitude) together with inertial sensor biases. An observab...
Conference Paper
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have found their application in exploration and surveillance. This paper proposes a cooperative distributed search algorithm based on a minimum entropy approach for AUVs with capabilities like multi agent exploration. The work is motivated by the project “Thesaurus”, whose among its own purposes has the survey...
Conference Paper
This paper presents a set of navigation, control and allocation algorithm suitable for underwater vehicles equipped with inertial measurement unit, underwater positioning systems and fixed thrusters with asymmetric response. All the algorithms are detailed in this document together with simulation results and comments. Low computational demand and...
Article
Full-text available
The paper presents a loosely coupled approach for the improvement of state estimation in autonomous inertial navigation, augmented via image-based relative motion estimation. The proposed approach uses a novel pose estimation technique based on the minimization of an entropy-like cost function which is robust by nature to the presence of noise and...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper describes a loosely coupled approach for the improvement of state estimation in autonomous inertial navigation, using image-based relative motion estimation for augmentation. The augmentation system uses a recently proposed pose estimation technique based on a Entropy-Like cost function, which was proven to be robust to the presence of n...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This contribution presents a constraints-based loosely-coupled Augmented Implicit Kalman Filter approach to vision-aided inertial navigation that uses epipolar constraints as output map. The proposed approach is capable of estimating the standard navigation output (velocity, position and attitude) together with inertial sensor biases. An observabil...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The growing use of Virtual Reality (VR) in rehabilitation is justified by a number of advantages, such as an increase of patient motivation, repetitiveness of learning trials, possibility to tailor treatment to individual subject, safety of the environment, quantitative patient improvement assessment, and remote data access. This paper proposes a n...
Conference Paper
This article proposes a novel solution to the Pose Estimation problem for Ego-Motion from stereo camera images. The approach uses a nonlinear function, derived from the concept of Gibbs' Entropy, which is robust by nature to the presence of noise and outliers in the visual features. The SIFT algorithm is used to collect and match the features from...
Conference Paper
The paper presents a loosely coupled approach for the improvement of the state estimation in autonomous inertial navigation tasks, augmented via image--based relative motion estimation. The proposed approach uses a novel Pose Estimation technique based on the minimization of a Entropy--Like cost function which is robust by nature to the presence of...

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