Category: Research

Unified Vision-Based Motion Estimation and Control for Multiple and Complex Robots

Overview The project considers teams of robots that need to collaborate on a physical task. As a driving application, we consider a Robot Construction Crew that needs to assemble a building using prefabricated components. Each robot might have non-trivial kinematics (e.g., a robotic arm mounted on a non-holonomic platform), and is generally equipped with vision […]

Multimodal, Task-Aware Movement Quality Assessment and Control: From the Clinic to the Home

Overview The goal of the project is to develop a novel, distributed sensor platform that continuously assesses movement in the background of one’s life and facilitates personalized, ”smart” intervention when detecting movement dysfunctions and functional decline, with the goal of helping people age in place and avoid expensive and lengthy hospitalizations. Motivation Frail older adults […]

Distributed semantic processing in camera networks

Overview In many applications, sensor networks can be used to monitor large geographical regions. This typically produces large quantities of data that need to be associated, summarized and classified in order to arrive to a semantically meaningful descriptions of the phenomena being monitored. The long-term guiding vision of this project is a distributed network that […]

Control of Micro Aerial Vehicles under Aerodynamic and Physical Contact Interactions

Overview The goal of this project is to make quadrotors and other similar small-scale flying rotorcraft safer and easier to fly. Both recreational and commercial use of these vehicles has recently surged in popularity. However, safety concerns about potentially damaging collisions limit their deployment near people or in close formation, and the current state of […]

Vision-based formation control

The goal of formation control is to move a group of agents in order to achieve and maintain a set of desired relative positions. This problem has a long history, and latest trends emphasize the use of vision-based solution. In this setting, the measurement of the relative direction (i.e., bearing) between two agents can be […]

Distributed localization algorithms

Imagine a wireless camera network, where each camera has a piece of local information, e.g., the pose of the object from a specific viewpoint or the relative poses with respect to the neighboring cameras. It is natural to look for distributed algorithms which merge all these local measurements into a single, globally consistent estimate. I […]

Consensus algorithms on Riemannian manifolds

Given a group of agents which move in Euclidean space and communicate according to a given communication graph, standard consensus algorithms provide a protocol which, as time passes, brings all the agents to a common location. The key aspect here is that only local communications are used. These algorithms, however, do not apply when the […]

Distributed optimization on Riemannian manifolds

I worked on distributed optimization problems involving variables lying on non-linear spaces (that is, Riemannian manifolds) using extensions of gradient descent algorithms with fixed step size. I developed novel theoretical tools which significantly broadened the state of the art for determining sufficient conditions for global behaviors (algorithm convergence) using only local information. These tools have […]