Rocco Galati

• Doctor of Engineering
• University of Salento

Agricultural robotics is one of the most challenging research areas in robotics given the complex challenges posed by terrain, crop and environmental conditions. This chapter reviews the use of (unmanned) ground robots in agriculture, focusing on the main different solutions in terms of mobility and kinematic architecture. The chapter discusses way...

Robotic and multi-sensor technologies are increasingly being adopted in a number of agricultural applications, including seeding, weeding, harvesting, fertilization, and crop monitoring and analysis. However, the lack of interoperability and the predominance of manufacturer-specific closed solutions demand a careful choice of devices, sensors and d...

Digital twins provide a powerful tool for testing and maintaining products and processes in several application fields, including manufacturing, smart cities, healthcare, and agriculture, aiming to optimize operational efficiency, resource usage, and planning accuracy. Research presented in this paper deals with the development of the digital versi...

This works provides a comparison about the energy consumption of a tracked vehicle with a passive suspension system by studying the case when it is remotely controlled by a human operator and when it is controlled by an autonomous navigation software. Results from an experimental campaign are presented along with considerations about the energy con...

This article focuses on a multibody model of a new passive articulated suspension tracked robot. The model of the vehicle is developed using the multibody software MSC Adams (acronym for automatic dynamic analysis of mechanical systems) in conjunction with the Adams Tracked Vehicle toolkit. The various subsystems that make up the vehicle assembly a...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2019.00046.].

This paper presents results coming from a non-linear model predictive controller used to generate optimized trajectories specifically for an omnidirectional robot equipped with a spraying unit to mark on the floor the perimeter of dangerous areas or to move large palletized goods inside warehouses. Results on different trajectories and with moving...

Reliable knowledge of the vehicle heading plays a significant role in the autonomous navigation of agricultural Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), especially in the context of unstructured outdoor environments such as rural and forestry scenarios. However, achieving this information with an acceptable degree of confidence is a non-trivial task and st...

The paper deals with the design and testing of a robot for industrial applications featuring omnidirectionality thanks to the use of mecanum wheels. While this architecture provides remarkable manoeuvrability in narrow or cluttered spaces, it has some drawbacks that limit its widespread deployment in practice, especially for heavy-duty and long-dur...

In the context of autonomous off-road mobility, tracked robots feature larger contact areas compared to equivalent wheeled vehicles, which turn into improved traction especially on soft terrains. This paper discusses a novel tracked robot, named Polibot, that is outfitted with passive articulated suspensions. The multibody model is developed within...

The paper presents RoboNav, a cost-effective and accurate decimeter-grade navigation system that can be used for deployment in the field of autonomous agricultural robots. The novelty of the system is the reliance on a dual GPS configuration based on two u-blox modules that work in conjunction with three low-cost inertial sensors within a Gaussian...

In the context of autonomous off-road mobility, tracked robots are useful because they offer a large contact area with the ground, which provides better traction than wheels especially on soft terrains. However, they pose many challenges for modeling when tracks are suspended via articulated mechanisms. This is the case for the all-terrain rover Po...

In this paper, the multibody model of a novel tracked vehicle with passive articulated suspension is presented. The vehicle being modeled is called Polibot, an electric unmanned ground robot specifically designed to traverse uneven terrains and perform precision field operations thanks to the perception system installed onboard. The model of the tr...

Ground vehicles equipped with vision-based perception systems can provide a rich source of information for precision agriculture tasks in orchards, including fruit detection and counting, phenotyping, plant growth and health monitoring. This paper presents a semi-supervised deep learning framework for automatic pomegranate detection using a farmer...

In this article, the results of nonlinear model predictive controllers that are used to generate optimized trajectories of omnidirectional robots equipped with spraying units for the perimeter of hazardous areas inside warehouses are presented, using a nonlinear model predictive controller. Results are provided for various trajectories along with c...

The use of robotic solutions for sustainability is critical to reduce pollution and waste of materials during the manufacturing processes, and it can significantly reduce the amount of energy employed compared with traditional methods. This paper presents two case studies in the development of mobile robotic solutions used to increase the manufactu...

This paper presents an integrated mechanics study for the design and the development of a service tracked robot able to move inside a truck container and roll over the flax raw material by compressing it to increase its overall bulk density. A series of flax material properties have been used to properly characterize the robot's locomotion paramete...

Advances in precision agriculture greatly rely on innovative control and sensing technologies that allow service units to increase their level of driving automation while ensuring at the same time high safety standards. This paper deals with automatic terrain estimation and classification that is performed simultaneously by an agricultural vehicle...

In this paper, Mixed Reality (MR) has been exploited in the operating rooms to perform laparoscopic and open surgery with the aim of providing remote mentoring to the medical doctors under training during the Covid-19 pandemic. The employed architecture, which has put together MR smartglasses, a Digital Imaging Player, and a Mixed Reality Toolkit,...

Currently, surgeons in operating rooms are forced to focus their attention both on the patient’s body and on flat low-quality surgical monitors, in order to get all the information needed to successfully complete surgeries. The way the data are displayed leads to disturbances of the surgeon’s visuals, which may affect his performances, besides the...

This paper presents a novel approach for terrain characterization based on a tracked skid-steer vehicle with a passive independent suspensions system. A set of physics-based parameters is used to characterize the terrain properties: drive motor electrical currents, the equivalent track, the power spectral density for the vertical accelerations and...

Advances in precision agriculture greatly rely on innovative control and sensing technologies that allow service units to increase their level of driving automation while ensuring at the same time high safety standards. This paper deals with automatic terrain estimation and classification that is performed simultaneously by an agricultural vehicle...

The paper addresses the localization issue for skid-steer vehicles. The large extent of slippage incurred by this type of vehicle in a turn heavily degrades the accuracy of their position estimation systems. Based on the kinematics modelling of skid-steering, the concept of equivalent track is presented. During field experiments with an off-road un...

In this paper, a novel approach for online terrain characterisation is presented using a skid-steer vehicle. In the context of this research, terrain characterisation refers to the estimation of physical parameters that affects the terrain ability to support vehicular motion. These parameters are inferred from the modelling of the kinematic and dyn...

The skid-steering principle is based on controlling the relative velocities of both the tracks as differential drive wheeled vehicles. However, control of tracked locomotion poses a more complex problem because variation of the relative velocity of the two tracks results often in slippage of the vehicle [1]. It is possible to define a kinematic app...