Ricerc@Sapienza

The Robotics group at DIAG was established in the late 1980s, with a commitment to develop innovative modeling, planning, and control methods for industrial and service robots. 

The main research topics are: control of manipulators with flexible elements (elastic joints, flexible links, variable stiffness actuation); hybrid force/velocity and impedance control of manipulators and aerial robots interacting with the environment; optimization schemes in kinematically redundant robots; motion planning for high-dimensional systems; motion planning and control of wheeled mobile robots and other nonholonomic mechanical systems; stabilization of underactuated robots; control-based motion planning for mobile manipulators; motion planning and control of locomotion in humanoid robots; sensor-based navigation and exploration in unknown environments; safe control of physical human-robot collaboration; sensory supervision of human-robot interaction; image-based visual servoing; control and visual servoing for unmanned aerial vehicles; multi-robot decentralized control, estimation, coordination and mutual localization.

 



Most of our research activities undergo experimental validation in the associated DIAG Robotics Lab. The current equipment consist of 6 articulated manipulators (a 6R Universal Robots UR10, a 7R Franka Emika Research 3, two 7R ABB single arm YuMi, a 7R KUKA LWR4 and a 6R KUKA KR5 industrial robot), 5 mobile robots (a TIAGo wheeled mobile manipulator with a 7 DoF arm by PAL Robotics, a OP3 small-size humanoid by ROBOTIS, a TITA wheeled legged robot by Direct Drive Tech, a Lite3 quadruped robot by Deep Robotics, and a G1 humanoid robot by Unitree robotics), 2 flying UAV (a Hummingbird and a Pelican quadrotor UAVs by AscTec), two haptic interfaces with 3D force feedback (Geomagic Touch), and an underactuated system (Pendubot by Quanser). These robots are equipped with sensing devices of various complexity, going from ultrasonic/laser range finders to cameras, and stereo vision systems. We have multiple RGB-D sensors, two 6D F/T sensors (Mini45 by ATI), and two HMDs (Oculus Rift). In the past, we have designed and built a two-link flexible manipulator (FlexArm) and a differentially-driven wheeled mobile robot (SuperMARIO)

Active research lines include (DIAG keywords in alphabetic order, with link to the related publications): Haptic and Locomotion Interfaces, Humanoid Locomotion, Medical Robotics, Mobile Robots, Motion and Trajectory Planning, Physical Human-Robot Interaction, Planning and Control of UAVs, Robot Control, Robot Learning for Planning and Control, Robot Modeling and Identification, Sensor-based Reaction and Planning,  Soft Robotics, Vision-based Control, Whole-Body Control of Humanoids.

Most relevant research projects funded by the European Commission: 

• SOAR-Touch - Soft Optical Aerial Robot Touch (May 2025-April 2026). Funded in the 3rd Open Call for Technology Exchange Programme of the Horizon Europe euROBIN Network of Excellence. PI: Alessandro De Luca
• COMANOID (RIA H2020-ICT-2014-1, 645097) - Multi-Contact Collaborative Humanoids in Aircraft Manufacturing (2015-2018). PI: Giuseppe Oriolo
• SYMPLEXITY (IA H2020-FoF-2014, 637080) - Symbiotic Human-Robot Solutions for Complex Surface Finishing Operations (2015-2018). PI: Alessandro De Luca
• SAPHARI (IP FP7 ICT, 287513) - Safe and Autonomous Physical Human-Aware Robot Interaction (2011-2015). Project Coordinator: Alessandro De Luca
• PHRIENDS (STREP FP6 IST, 045359) - Physical Human-Robot Interaction: Dependability and Safety (2006-2009). Selected results obtained by our group in PHRIENDS can be found here. PI: Alessandro De Luca
• Cyberwalk (STREP FP6 IST, 511092) - The CyberCarpet: Enabling Omni-directional Walking in Virtual Worlds (2005-2008). Selected results obtained by our group in CyberWalk can be found here. PI: Alessandro De Luca