Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

The activities of Rainbow falls obviously within the scope of Robotics. Broadly speaking, our main interest in in devising novel/efficient algorithms (for estimation, planning, control, haptic cueing, human interfacing, etc.) that can be general and applicable to many different robotic systems of interest, depending on the particular application/case study. For instance, we plan to consider

• applications involving remote telemanipulation with one or two robot arms, where the arm(s) will need to coordinate their motion for approaching/grasping objects of interest under the guidance of a human operator;

• applications involving single and multiple mobile robots for spatial navigation tasks (e.g., exploration, surveillance, mapping). In the multi-robot case, the high redundancy of the multi-robot group will motivate research in autonomously exploiting this redundancy for facilitating the task (e.g., optimizing the self-localization of the environment mapping) while following the human commands, and vice-versa for informing the operator about the status of a multi-robot group. In the single robot case, the possible combination with some manipulation devices (e.g., arms on a wheeled robot) will motivate research into remote tele-navigation and tele-manipulation;

• applications involving medical robotics, in which the “manipulators” are replaced by the typical tools used in medical applications (ultrasound probes, needles, cutting scalpels, and so on) for semi-autonomous probing and intervention;

• applications involving a direct physical “coupling” between human users and robots (rather than a “remote” interfacing), such as the case of assistive devices used for easing the life of impaired people. Here, we will be primarily interested in, e.g., safety and usability issues, and also touch some aspects of user acceptability.

These directions are, in our opinion, very promising since nowadays and future robotics applications are expected to address more and more complex tasks: for instance, it is becoming mandatory to empower robots with the ability to predict the future (to some extent) by also explicitly dealing with uncertainties from sensing or actuation; to safely and effectively interact with human supervisors (or collaborators) for accomplishing shared tasks; to learn or adapt to the dynamic environments from small prior knowledge; to exploit the environment (e.g., obstacles) rather than avoiding it (a typical example is a humanoid robot in a multi-contact scenario for facilitating walking on rough terrains); to optimize the onboard resources for large-scale monitoring tasks; to cooperate with other robots either by direct sensing/communication, or via some shared database (the “cloud”).

While no single lab can reasonably address all these theoretical/algorithmic/technological challenges, we believe that our research agenda can give some concrete contributions to the next generation of robotics applications.