Category: Robotics
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Beach Cleaner Project from BCC
The Beach Cleaner Project focuses on developing a lightweight, practical, and affordable tool designed to clean beaches efficiently from plastics, general debris and natural material, without compromising the natural environment. The aim is to create a user-friendly solution that allows anyone to maintain coastal areas and beachfront properties, such as hotels and beach clubs in a…
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Fall Recovery for Quadrupeds
Introduction Legged robots operating in real-world environments are inevitably exposed to disturbances, uneven terrain, and interaction forces that can lead to loss of balance and falls. Robust fall recovery is therefore a critical capability for enabling truly autonomous deployment of quadruped robots in unstructured settings. While traditional approaches rely on hand-crafted reflexes or carefully engineered…
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Fall Recovery for Humanoid Robots
Introduction Humanoid robots are designed to operate in human-centered environments, where unexpected contacts, uneven terrain, and external disturbances frequently lead to loss of balance and falls. Reliable fall recovery is therefore a key capability for long-term autonomous operation and human–robot coexistence. Classical approaches rely on carefully engineered whole-body controllers and pre-defined get-up sequences, which are…
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Actuator Modeling
Introduction Recent advances in GPU-based physics simulation and deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) have enabled the rapid training of control policies for complex, highly articulated robots such as quadrupeds and humanoids. Parallelized simulators now make it possible to obtain policies that transfer to hardware in a matter of minutes of simulated experience [1]. Despite this progress,…
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VLAs for Navigation
Introduction Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for grounding natural-language instructions in perception and control, enabling robots to execute high-level commands specified in human-friendly terms. In this project, we consider a navigation setting in which a mobile robot (Unitree GO2) receives an egocentric RGB-D observation together with a short natural-language instruction…
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Quadruped Teleoperation System
Introduction Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently enabled agile and dynamic behaviors in legged robots. However, RL alone is not always the most suitable tool, especially for sparse, long-horizon tasks that involve complex object manipulation. Even with careful problem formulation, reward design, and curriculum learning, such tasks can remain difficult to solve using standard RL methods.…
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Comparing Modern AI-Powered 3D Reconstruction Pipelines with Traditional Human Motion Capture Systems
Contacts: Marta Gandolla, Andrea Dal Prete Location: Politecnico di Milano (Bovisa Campus) Motivation of the study: Accurate human kinematics measurement is fundamental in biomechanics, ergonomics, and human–robot interaction, yet traditional approaches remain limited. Optical motion capture systems deliver high accuracy but require expensive equipment and controlled laboratory conditions, while IMU-based methods offer portability at the cost of…
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Refinement and Optimization of an Existing Reinforcement Learning Framework for Back Exoskeleton Control
Contacts: Marta Gandolla, Andrea Dal Prete Location: Politecnico di Milano (Bovisa Campus) Motivation of the study. Back exoskeletons are increasingly studied to reduce spinal loads and muscular effort in physically demanding tasks, with both rigid and soft designs showing promising results. However, widespread adoption is limited by the challenge of developing controllers that can adapt to different…
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Real-Time Estimation of Arm Impedance and Variable Admittance Control for Elbow Exosuit
Contacts: Marta Gandolla, Andrea Dal Prete, Ali KhalilianMotamed Bonab Location: Politecnico di Milano (Bovisa Campus) – Scuola Sant’Anna di Pisa Motivation of the study. This thesis, developed within a collaboration between Politecnico di Milano and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, focuses on adaptive control strategies for a hybrid soft–rigid elbow exosuit. The project aims to estimate user biomechanical impedance…
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Design of a Hybrid Rigid-Soft Cable-Driven Back Exoskeleton
Contacts: Marta Gandolla, Andrea Dal Prete, Ali KhalilianMotamed Bonab Location: Politecnico di Milano (Bovisa Campus) – Scuola Sant’Anna di Pisa Motivation of the study. Musculoskeletal disorders are a major concern in jobs involving repetitive lifting, as they increase spinal loading, fatigue, and the risk of back injuries. Back support exoskeletons (BEs) aim to reduce these…