The Robotics group at DIAG, and the associated DIAG Robotics Lab, were established in the late 1980s with a commitment to develop innovative 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 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 DIAG Robotics Lab.
The current equipment consists of:
- 5 articulated manipulators (UR10, Franka Emika Research 3, ABB YuMi, KUKA KR5)
- 5 mobile robots (TIAGo, OP3 humanoid, TITA robot, Lite3 quadruped, Unitree G1 humanoid)
- 2 UAV quadrotors (Hummingbird and Pelican)
- Haptic interfaces with 3D force feedback (Geomagic Touch)
- An underactuated system (Pendubot)
These robots are equipped with sensing devices of various complexity, including ultrasonic and laser range finders, cameras, stereo vision systems, RGB-D sensors, force/torque sensors (Mini45 by ATI), and 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).
