i i “research_activity” — 2016/12/27 — 19:22 — page 1 — #1 i i i i i i UNIVERSITÁ DIPISA
DOTTORATO DI RICERCA ININGEGNERIA DELL’INFORMAZIONE
R
ESEARCH
A
CTIVITY
R
EPORT
Author
Alessandro Settimi
Tutor (s)
Prof. Lucia Pallottino Prof. Antonio Bicchi
Reviewer (s)
Prof. Emilio Frazzoli Prof. Timothy Bretl
The Coordinator of the PhD Program
Prof. Marco Luise
Pisa, September 2016 XXIX
i i “research_activity” — 2016/12/27 — 19:22 — page 2 — #2 i i i i i i Research Activity
During the Ph.D. program in Information Engineering I carried out my research regarding hierarchical planning and control for humanoid robots within the project Walk-Man (European Community’s 7th Framework Programme: FP7-ICT 611832, Cognitive Systems and Robotics: FP7-ICT-2013-10).
The aim of the project is to develop a robotic platform able to intervene in dangerous situations in place of human agents. A primitive based hierarchical planning and control framework is one of the basic capabilities the Walk-Man robot must have to deal with complex and unstructured scenarios.
During the first period, my activity was focused on studying how to generate motion primitives to be used in the first Walk-Man validation scenario: the Darpa Robotics Challenge (Pomona, California, June 2015). The DRC tasks have been addressed by the Walk-Man team during this period, and in particular I worked on the following tasks: valve turning, door opening, and driving. Moreover I developed a user friendly and reconfigurable Pilot Interface to be used during the DRC to control the robot from a remote location. This interface has also been improved in this years adding the new robot’s capabilities and has been used in different events.
After the DRC I started to study how to combine together the motion primitives realized for the Darpa Robotics Challenge and also for other purposes. The basic idea was to exploit probabilistic completeness of sample based algorithms without planning in the whole robot joint space. Using motion primitives led to describe complex actions using parametrized control entities, to be combined without jeopardizing the stability of the robot. This has been done by checking if one primitive could be used together with another, using stability bounds. For example grasping an object while walking cannot be usually done if the walking primitive and the manipulation one were not designed meant to work together. The development of P-Search∗ has been carried out, a primitive based sampling algorithm that returns the sequence of primitive to be executed (potentially in parallel) by the robot to solve a certain task.
Nevertheless, considering all the possible primitives that the robot is able to execute can hazard the tractability achieved by using the motion primitives formalization. Indeed the P-Search∗performances can decrease if the problem dimension arise too much. To avoid this problem a Motion Description Languages bases on motion primitives, namely P–MDL, has been proposed and it is currently under development. This language allows, given a certain scenario, to discern which motion primitives can be used, and also in which order, depending on the task. This leads to decrease the burden for the proposed primitive planning algorithm.
List of publications
International Journals
1. N. G. Tsagarakis, D. G. Caldwell, A. Bicchi, F. Negrello, M. Garabini, W. Choi, L. Baccelliere, V. G. Loc, J. Noorden, M. Catalano, M. Ferrati, L. Muratore, A. Margan, L. Natale, E. Mingo, H. Dallali, A. Settimi, A. Rocchi, V. Varricchio, L. Pallottino, C. Pavan, A. Ajoudani, J. Lee, and P. Kryczka. WALK-MAN: A High Performance Humanoid Platform for Realistic Environments. Journal of Field
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Robotics, JFR 2016. Wiley Blackwell.
2. Ferrati, M., Settimi, A., Muratore, L., Tsagarakis, N., Natale, L., and Pallottino, L. (2016). The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 3, 25.
3. Marino, H., Ferrati, M., Settimi, A., Rosales, C., and Gabiccini, M. (2016). On the Problem of Moving Objects With Autonomous Robots: A Unifying High-Level Planning Approach. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 1(1), 469-476. IEEE. International Conferences/Workshops with Peer Review
1. Settimi A and Caporale D and Kryczka P and Ferrati M and Pallottino L. Motion Primitive Based Random Planning for Loco-Manipulation Tasks. In the 16th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), 2016, IEEE (in press).
2. Ferrati, M., Nardi, S., Settimi, A., Marino, H., and Pallottino, L. Multi-object handling for robotic manufacturing. In the 42nd Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society IECON 2016, IEEE (in press).
3. Ajoudani, A., Lee, J., Rocchi, A., Ferrati, M., Hoffman, E. M., Settimi, A., and Tsagarakis, N. G. (2014, November). A manipulation framework for compli-ant humanoid coman: Application to a valve turning task. In 2014 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (pp. 664-670). IEEE.
4. Lee, J., Ajoudani, A., Hoffman, E. M., Rocchi, A., Settimi, A., Ferrati, M., and Caldwell, D. G. (2014, November). Upper-body impedance control with variable stiffness for a door opening task. In 2014 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (pp. 713-719). IEEE.
5. Settimi, A., Pavan, C., Varricchio, V., Ferrati, M., Hoffman, E. M., Rocchi, A., and Bicchi, A. (2014, May). A modular approach for remote operation of humanoid robots in search and rescue scenarios. In International Workshop on Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems (pp. 192-205). Springer International Publishing.
6. Ferrati, M., Settimi, A., and Pallottino, L. (2014, May). ASCARI: A Component Based Simulator for Distributed Mobile Robot Systems. In International Workshop on Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems (pp. 152-163). Springer International Publishing.
7. Hoffman, E. M., Traversaro, S., Rocchi, A., Ferrati, M., Settimi, A., Romano, F., and Tsagarakis, N. G. (2014, May). Yarp based plugins for gazebo simulator. In International Workshop on Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems (pp. 333-346). Springer International Publishing.
8. Settimi, A., and Pallottino, L. (2013, December). A subgradient based algorithm for distributed task assignment for heterogeneous mobile robots. In 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (pp. 3665-3670). IEEE.
