VIACTORS - Variable Impedance ACTuation systems embodying advanced interaction behaviORS

01.02.2009 - 31.01.2012. Viactors project aims at developing and exploiting actuation technologies for a new generation of robots that can co-exist and co-operate with people and get much closer to the human manipulation and locomotion performance than today’s robots do. At the same time these robots are expected to be safe, in the sense that interacting with them should not constitute a higher injury risk to humans than the interaction with another cautious human.

Safe Quarry

Il progetto SAFE QUARRY si inserisce nella categoria “Sistemi e distretti produttivi tipici” promosso dalla Regione Toscana ed è finalizzato ad introdurre tecnologie di monitoraggio innovative a supporto del distretto lapideo con lo scopo di aumentare e migliorare l’attività estrattiva. La tecnologia di monitoraggio in via di sviluppo nel corso di progetto è orientata ad automatizzare ed aumentare le operazioni di controllo del sottosuolo, e le relative attività di analisi ed interpretazione dei dati, con una conseguente necessità di personale altamente qualificato.

STAMAS - Smart technology for artificial muscle applications in space

Human activities in space environments have a negative effect on the astronauts’ health. the STAMAS (Smart technology for artificial muscle applications in space) consortium will develop a new type of astronauts’ suit, a “smart-suit”, which will mitigate the pernicious effects of weightlessness and motor inactivity and, thus, maintain the astronauts’ health and physical fitness during and after a space mission. The project will utilise existing terrestrial experience in Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) and Electroactive Polymer (EAP) technologies.

WALK-MAN - Whole body Adaptive Locomotion and Manipulation

WALK-MAN is a 4 years integrated project (IP) funded by the European Commission through the call FP7-ICT-2013-10. The project started on September 2013 and has the goal to develop a robotic platform (of an anthropomorphic form) which can operate outside the laboratory space in unstructured environments and work spaces as a result of natural and man-made disasters. The robot will demonstrate new skills including:

OS4BME Africa Project

OS4BME (Open Source for Biomedical Engineering) was conceived at the Research Center E. Piaggio of University of Pisa and FabLab Pisa by Arti Ahluwalia (Professor of Bioengineering), Daniele Mazzei and Carmelo De Maria (Biomedical Engineers, co-founders of FabLab Pisa and researchers at the Center).

PACMAN - Probabilistic and Compositional Representations of Objects for Robotic Manipulation

The aim of the project is to advance technologies for, and understand the principles of cognition and control in complex systems. We will meet this challenge by advancing methods for object perception, representation and manipulation so that a robot is able to robustly manipulate objects even when those objects are unfamiliar, and even though the robot has unreliable perception and action. The proposal is founded on two assumptions.

WEARHAP - Wearable Haptics for Humans and Robots

The complexity of the world around us is creating a demand for cognition-enabled interfaces that will simplify and enhance the way we interact with the environment. Project WEARHAP, developed in this proposal, aims at laying the scientific and technological foundations for wearable haptics, a novel concept for the systematic exploration of haptics in advanced cognitive systems and robotics that will redefine the way humans will cooperate with robots.
The challenge of this new paradigm stems from the need for wearability which is a key element for natural interaction.

Softhands, a theory of SOFT synergies for a new generation of artificial HANDS

Although many advances have been made in the mechatronics and computational hardware of artificial hands, the state of the art appears to be only marginally closer to a satisfactory functional approximation of the human hand than it was twenty years ago. The main reasons for this  invest some fundamental issues in the understanding of the organization and control of hands, and ultimately the lack of a theory to guide us in the search for a principled approach to taming the complexity of hands as the physical embodiments of the sense of active touch, and com

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