Ricerc@Sapienza

A redundant robotic system must execute a task in a workspace populated by obstacles whose motion is unknown in advance. For this problem setting, we present a sensor-based planner that uses Model Predictive Control (MPC) to generate motion commands for the robot. We also propose a real-time implementation of the planner based on ACADO, an open source toolkit for solving general nonlinear MPC problems. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown through simulations and experiments carried out on a UR10 manipulator.

Obstacle detection is a fundamental task for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as a part of a Sense and Avoid system. In this study, we present a method of multi-sensor obstacle detection that demonstrated good results on different kind of obstacles. This method can be implemented on low-cost platforms involving a DSP or small FPGA. In this paper, we also present a study on the typical targets that can be tough to detect because of their characteristics of reflectivity, form factor, heterogeneity and show how data fusion can often overcome the limitations of each technology.