Bio
Andrea Del Prete was born in Cesena (Italy) in 1984. He received his degree in Computer Engineering (with honors) from the 2nd faculty of the University of Bologna (Italy) in 2009. In 2010 he started his PhD in the Cognitive Humanoids laboratory of the department of "Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences" in IIT, Genoa.
His research focuses on estimation and control of contact forces using tactile sensors and force/torque sensors. He also is interested in dynamics, redundant robots, underactuated robots, reinforcement learning and he has fallen in love with the singular value decomposition. He thinks the world is just a big matrix. :)
Projects
RoboSKIN will pursue three main objectives:
To develop new sensor technologies that can provide tactile feedback from large areas of the robot body. This development process will be incremental and will take advantage of the feedback arising from the application of these technologies towards the other project objectives.
To develop and integrate fundamental cognitive structures for efficient and safe utilization of tactile data in terms of a robot body image, safe reflexive reactions to tactile events and flexible representations of spatially and temporally distributed patterns of physical contact.
To develop cognitive mechanisms that use tactile feedback to improve human-robot interaction capabilities particularly in the application domains of programming through demonstration and robot assisted play.
Other Publications
[1] A. Del Prete et al., “Skin Spatial Calibration Using Force/Torque Measurements,” in Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, 2011.
[2] A. Del Prete, L. Natale, F. Nori, and G. Metta, “Contact Force Estimations Using Tactile Sensors and Force / Torque Sensors,” in Human Robot Interaction 2012, 2012, pp. 0-2.
[3] A. D. Prete, F. Nori, G. Metta, and L. Natale, “Control of Contact Forces : the Role of Tactile Feedback for Contact Localization.” Submitted to IROS 2012.
