Fulvio Mastrogiovanni

University of Genoa | UNIGE · Dipartimento di Informatica, Bioingegneria, Robotica e Ingegneria dei Sistemi (DIBRIS)

In this paper, we propose a method to remove distortion from highly-distorted input images by an ultra-wide-angle vision sensor. We extend an extensive look-up table step by step by taking into account reduction of chromatic aberration, as iteratively concatenating look-up tables for distortion removal using projective transformation of a local sma...

As collaborative robots become more common in manufacturing scenarios and adopted in hybrid human-robot teams, we should develop new interaction and communication strategies to ensure smooth collaboration between agents. In this paper, we propose a novel communicative interface that uses Mixed Reality as a medium to perform Kinesthetic Teaching (KT...

This article investigates mixed reality (MR) to enhance human-robot collaboration (HRC). The proposed solution adopts MR as a communication layer to convey a mobile manipulator's intentions and upcoming actions to the humans with whom it interacts, thus improving their collaboration. A user study involving 20 participants demonstrated the effective...

Dexterous in-hand manipulation is a unique and valuable human skill requiring sophisticated sensorimotor interaction with the environment while respecting stability constraints. Satisfying these constraints with generated motions is essential for a robotic platform to achieve reliable in-hand manipulation skills. Explicitly modeling these constrain...

We propose a dataset to study the influence of object-specific characteristics on human pick-and-place movements and compare the quality of the motion kinematics extracted by various sensors. This dataset is also suitable for promoting a broader discussion on general learning problems in the hand-object interaction domain, such as intention recogni...

This paper introduces an innovative digital workflow for printability checkingand prefabrication in robotic construction 3D printing based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning techniques. The proposed method generates operational sequences for a robotic manipulator tasked with concrete 3D printing by utilizing Planning Domain Definition Languag...

This paper presents a comprehensive framework to enhance Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in real-world scenarios. It introduces a formalism to model articulated tasks, requiring cooperation between two agents, through a smaller set of primitives. Our implementation leverages Hierarchical Task Networks (HTN) planning and a modular multisensory perce...

Dexterous in-hand manipulation is a unique and valuable human skill requiring sophisticated sensorimotor interaction with the environment while respecting stability constraints. Satisfying these constraints with generated motions is essential for a robotic platform to achieve reliable in-hand manipulation skills. Explicitly modelling these constrai...

Symbolic task planning is a widely used approach to enforce robot autonomy due to its ease of understanding and deployment in engineered robot architectures. However, techniques for symbolic task planning are difficult to scale in real-world, highly dynamic, human-robot collaboration scenarios because of the poor performance in planning domains whe...

Hands are a fundamental tool humans use to interact with the environment and objects. Through hand motions, we can obtain information about the shape and materials of the surfaces we touch, modify our surroundings by interacting with objects, manipulate objects and tools, or communicate with other people by leveraging the power of gestures. For the...

Surgical robotics may use augmented reality (AR) to provide surgeons with contextual information during operations. Relevant information to show to the surgeon are soft-tissue deformations. However, real-time computation of soft-tissue deformations is challenging with current techniques. A novel approach is proposed using Machine Learning (ML) to e...

The Contact Surface Area (CSA) is a predictor for peri-operative parameters and represent the contact area between the tumor and the respective organ. Nowadays, a precise method for calculating CSA is yet to be found in the literature. We tested a new CSA calculation method as a predictor of intra-operative parameters in robot assisted partial neph...

We propose a dataset to study the influence of object-specific characteristics on human pick-and-place movements and compare the quality of the motion kinematics extracted by various sensors. This dataset is also suitable for promoting a broader discussion on general learning problems in the hand-object interaction domain, such as intention recogni...

The rapid growth of electronic waste (e-waste) highlights the need for effective recycling processes. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are a significant component of e-waste, containing valuable materials and toxic elements. However, the recycling of PCBs faces challenges associated with their diverse materials and components, lack of standardization,...

This article presents an open-source architecture for conveying robots' intentions to human teammates using Mixed Reality and Head-Mounted Displays. The architecture has been developed focusing on its modularity and re-usability aspects. Both binaries and source code are available, enabling researchers and companies to adopt the proposed architectu...

Dexterous in-hand manipulation is a peculiar and useful human skill. This ability requires the coordination of many senses and hand motion to adhere to many constraints. These constraints vary and can be influenced by the object characteristics or the specific application. One of the key elements for a robotic platform to implement reliable inhand...

Human manual dexterity relies critically on touch. Robotic and prosthetic hands are much less dexterous and make little use of the many tactile sensors available. We propose a framework modeled on the hierarchical sensorimotor controllers of the nervous system to link sensing to action in human-in-the-loop, haptically enabled, artificial hands. Sum...

We present an approach for safe motion planning under robot state and environment (obstacle and landmark location) uncertainties. To this end, we first develop an approach that accounts for the landmark uncertainties during robot localization. Existing planning approaches assume that the landmark locations are well known or are known with little un...

The minimum constraint removal problem seeks to find the minimum number of constraints, i.e., obstacles, that need to be removed to connect a start to a goal location with a collision-free path. This problem is NP-hard and has been studied in robotics, wireless sensing, and computational geometry. This work contributes to the existing literature by...

Demographic growth and rise in the average age of the population is increasing the demand for the elderly assistance. Health care oriented ambient intelligence technologies are fundamental to support elderly peoples' autonomy. In this paper, we present a smart home system that is able to recognize human activities and is integrated with a proactive...

The problem of integrating high-level task planning in the execution loop of a real-world robot architecture remains challenging, as the planning times of traditional symbolic planners explode combinatorially with the number of symbols to plan upon. In this paper, we present Teriyaki, a framework for training Large Language Models (LLMs), and in pa...

In this paper, we look into the minimum obstacle displacement (MOD) planning problem from a mobile robot motion planning perspective. This problem finds an optimal path to goal by displacing movable obstacles when no path exists due to collision with obstacles. However this problem is computationally expensive and grows exponentially in the size of...

Demographic growth and rise in the average age of the population is increasing the demand for the elderly assistance. Health care oriented ambient intelligence technologies are fundamental to support elderly peoples’ autonomy. In this paper, we present a smart home system that is able to recognize human activities and is integrated with a proactive...

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative robots can achieve the same ability by modulating the strategy used to transport objects with their end-effector. A...

By incorporating ergonomics principles into the task allocation processes, human-robot collaboration (HRC) frameworks can favour the prevention of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). In this context, existing offline methodologies do not account for the variability of human actions and states; therefore, planning and dynamically assigni...

This paper presents a minimum displacement motion planning problem wherein obstacles are displaced by a minimum amount to find a feasible path. We define a metric for robot-obstacle intersection that measures the extent of the intersection and use this to penalize robot-obstacle overlaps. Employing the actual robot dynamics, the planner first finds...

Close human-robot interaction (HRI), especially in industrial scenarios, has been vastly investigated for the advantages of combining human and robot skills. For an effective HRI, the validity of currently available human-machine communication media or tools should be questioned, and new communication modalities should be explored. This article pro...

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative robots can achieve the same ability by modulating the strategy used to transport objects with their end-effector. A...

This paper proposes a novel software architecture for generalized scenarios of human-robot collaboration, in which a Digital Twin mirrors, monitors, and guides the interaction in real time, while Mixed Reality is used as a medium to ensure intuitive communication between agents involved.

For humans, the hands represent the most important medium of interaction with the environment. In fact, their sophisticated kinematic structure and perception abilities allow to hold objects, perform gestures and perceive contact forces. The development of tools capable of detecting this information has become increasingly important in recent years...

We present an approach for multi-robot integrated task and motion planning that allocates tasks to robots. Specifically , we focus on transportation-like tasks where the objective of a task correspond to transporting objects to a desired location. We demonstrate the performance under varying robot number and transportation tasks.

Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for collaborative robots if they are to interact naturally and effectively. For example, suppose a robot is handing ove...

Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for collaborative robots if they are to interact naturally and effectively. For example, suppose a robot is handing ove...

We present an AND/OR graph-based, integrated multi-robot task and motion planning approach which (i) performs task allocation coordinating the activity of a given number of robots, and (ii) is capable of handling tasks which involve an a priori unknown number of object re-arrangements, such as those involved in retrieving objects from cluttered wor...

Close human-robot interaction (HRI), especially in industrial scenarios, has been vastly investigated for the advantages of combining human and robot skills. For an effective HRI, the validity of currently available human-machine communication media or tools should be questioned, and new communication modalities should be explored. This article pro...

We present an approach for safe motion planning under robot state and environment (obstacle and landmark location) uncertainties. To this end, we first develop an approach that accounts for the landmark uncertainties during robot localization. Existing planning approaches assume that the landmark locations are well known or are known with little un...

The proliferation of video-sharing platforms and MOOCs has raised new challenges in the field of education. A challenging topic that is gaining an increased popularity is the identification of prerequisite relations between concepts in video lectures. In this paper, we propose unsupervised methods for prerequisite identification and the creation of...

Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot collaboration may be achieved by enabling robots to convey their intentions to human teammates via multiple communicati...

Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot collaboration may be achieved by enabling robots to convey their intentions to human teammates via multiple communicat...

This paper presents a minimum displacement motion planning problem wherein obstacles are displaced by a minimum amount to find a feasible path. We define a metric for robot-obstacle intersection that measures the extent of the intersection and use this to penalize robot-obstacle overlaps. Employing the actual robot dynamics, the planner first finds...

Online generation of collision free trajectories is of prime importance for autonomous navigation. Dynamic environments, robot motion and sensing uncertainties adds further challenges to collision avoidance systems. This paper presents an approach for collision avoidance in dynamic environments, incorporating robot and obstacle state uncertainties....

Object manipulation is a natural activity we perform every day. How humans handle objects can communicate not only the willfulness of the acting, or key aspects of the context where we operate, but also the properties of the objects involved, without any need for explicit verbal description. Since human intelligence comprises the ability to read th...

Tactile sensing endows the robots to perceive certain physical properties of the object in contact. Robots with tactile perception can classify textures by touching. Interestingly, textures of fine micro-geometry beyond the nominal resolution of the tactile sensors can also be identified through exploratory robotic movements like sliding. To study...

We present an integrated Task-Motion Planning (TMP) framework for navigation in large-scale environment. Autonomous robots operating in real world complex scenarios require planning in the discrete (task) space and the continuous (motion) space. In knowledge intensive domains, on the one hand, a robot has to reason at the highest-level, for example...

The possibility for humans to interact with physical or virtual systems using gestures has been vastly explored by researchers and designers in the last twenty years to provide new and intuitive interaction modalities. Unfortunately, the literature about gestural interaction is not homogeneous, and it is characterised by a lack of shared terminolog...

This paper presents the design and preliminary evaluation of a wearable sensorised thimble based on CySkin Technology. It can be used to monitor grasping pressures and contact area during assessment and rehabilitation of people with deficits in the neural control of movements and/or neurological diseases. The design of the wearable thimble has been...

OWLOOP is an Application Programming Interface (API) for using the Ontology Web Language (OWL) by the means of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). It is common to design software architectures using the OOP paradigm for increasing their modularity. If the components of an architecture also exploit OWL ontologies for knowledge representation and reas...

Computing collision-free trajectories is of prime importance for safe navigation. We present an approach for computing the collision probability under Gaussian distributed motion and sensing uncertainty with the robot and static obstacle shapes approximated as ellipsoids. The collision condition is formulated as the distance between ellipsoids and...

OWLOOP is an Application Programming Interface (API) for using the Ontology Web Language (OWL) by the means of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). It is common to design software architectures using the OOP paradigm for increasing their modularity. If the components of an architecture also exploit OWL ontologies for knowledge representation and reas...

The possibility for humans to interact with physical or virtual systems using gestures has been vastly explored by researchers and designers in the last 20 years to provide new and intuitive interaction modalities. Unfortunately, the literature about gestural interaction is not homogeneous, and it is characterized by a lack of shared terminology. T...

When manipulating objects, humans finely adapt their motions to the characteristics of what they are handling. Thus, an attentive observer can foresee hidden properties of the manipulated object, such as its weight, temperature, and even whether it requires special care in the manipulation. This study is a step towards endowing a humanoid robot wit...

Computing collision-free trajectories is of prime importance for safe navigation. We present an approach for computing the collision probability under Gaussian distributed motion and sensing uncertainty with the robot and static obstacle shapes approximated as ellipsoids. The collision condition is formulated as the distance between ellipsoids and...

We present an AND/OR graph-based, integrated multi-robot task and motion planning approach which (i) performs task allocation coordinating the activity of a given number of robots, and (ii) is capable of handling tasks which involve an a priori unknown number of object re-arrangements, such as those involved in retrieving objects from cluttered wor...

Human-object interaction is of great relevance for robots to operate in human environments. However, state-of-the-art robotic hands are far from replicating humans skills. It is, therefore, essential to study how humans use their hands to develop similar robotic capabilities. This article presents a deep dive into hand-object interaction and human...

When manipulating objects, humans finely adapt their motions to the characteristics of what they are handling. Thus, an attentive observer can foresee hidden properties of the manipulated object, such as its weight, temperature, and even whether it requires special care in manipulation. This study is a step towards endowing a humanoid robot with th...

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