Category: Robotics
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Vision-based policies for human-robot collaboration
This thesis investigates vision-based policies (e.g., VLAs, diffusion policy, flow matching) for human-robot collaboration. Despite standard collaborative controllers which make only use of the robot and (if available) human states, vision-based policies are trained additionally on images captured during the task execution. This provides the robot with the possibility to embed the perception of the…
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Development of an adaptive control architecture and test-bench validation for a knee joint of a transfemoral prosthesis
Motivation of the study. Transfemoral lower-limb amputations significantly impact mobility and quality of life, motivating continuous research and development in the field of active prosthetic devices. In recent years, powered transfemoral prostheses have emerged as a promising solution to restore more natural and efficient gait patterns by actively assisting the user during locomotion. A key…
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Systematic Validation and Expansion of Thermal Imaging Algorithms for Muscular Activity and Fatigue Monitoring
Contacts: Marta Gandolla, Andrea Dal Prete Location: Politecnico di Milano (Bovisa Campus) Motivation of the study: Monitoring muscle activation and fatigue is crucial for optimizing physical performance and preventing work-related musculoskeletal disorders, particularly in industrial environments where back-support exoskeletons are increasingly used. While Surface Electromyography (SEMG) is the traditional gold standard, it suffers from limitations such as…
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Virtual Model Control of a Soft Compliant Manipulator
Soft continuum robotic arms offer unparalleled dexterity and compliance over rigid bodies, thus facilitating safe and robust interactions with environments. These characteristics make them ideal for diverse applications, such as collaborative robotics or medical contexts. However, due to their virtually infinite degrees of freedom, control of these systems has always been a challenge. Various control…
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Bipedal gait analysis on planetary surfaces
Evaluation of the mechanical cost of transport for a bipedal robot during four bipedal locomotion gaits (walking, running, jumping, and skipping), performed in simulation within three different gravitational scenarios: on Earth, Mars, and the Moon. Contacts Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt German Aerospace Center Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics Münchner Straße 20 82234 Wessling…
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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…