Team Delta's objective is to craft a robust locomotion architecture for ergoCub, our humanoid robot, facilitating safe interaction with both humans and the environment. This sophisticated framework seamlessly integrates nonlinear optimal control algorithms with machine learning components to deliver precise torque commands, ensuring smooth and reliable movement. Moreover, the team, dedicated to elevating the robot's autonomy levels, enabling it to navigate complex environments and engage in seamless collaboration with humans.

Central to this endeavor is the concept of 'physical intelligence,' wherein the robot not only performs physical tasks such as lifting objects collaboratively to mitigate biomechanical risks but also possesses cognitive capabilities. These include the ability to perceive its surroundings, recognize objects, estimate their attributes, and even discern human intentions to facilitate efficient cooperation.

  ergoCub

Team Tau is responsible for maintaining and developing the software and related technologies enabling the humanoid Avatar system. The team handle technology transfer projects around the AMI teleoperation infrastructure, facilitating the seamless integration of teleoperation technologies across various domains, applications  and robots. 

Their focus is on ensuring the continued functionality and advancement of the Avatar system while also facilitating the adoption of teleoperation solutions through collaborative initiatives.

Avatar System

The iFeel-Human team is focused on the human-centric aspects of our research, improving ways to record and use biomechanical quantities gathered through our iFeel wearable technology.

The team focus is both on the hardware  and software development of this technology, aimed at monitoring human whole-body quantities and predicting biomechanical risks in several workplaces. Additionally, they oversee the maintenance and optimization of all operator-side hardware within our avatar system.

iFeel wearables

Interest in improving robots' adaptability across tasks and scenarios is rising, and advanced platforms with multi-modal locomotion capabilities are being developed for this purpose. In this context, Aerial Humanoid Robotics is a research field focused on combining terrestrial and aerial locomotion in humanoid robots. 

The iRonCub team contributes to this area by designing a jet-powered humanoid robot, iRonCub, covering all stages from mechanical design to experimentation. Their work encompasses mechanical design, jet engines modeling, QP-based control algorithms development, trajectory planning using MPC and RL, pose estimation with Kalman Filtering, aerodynamics modeling with validation in a wind tunnel, culminating in real prototype takeoff experiments.

iRonCub

The team Alpha develops models that parametrize the robot sensorimotor intelligence in terms of, e.g., the body density distribution, number of degrees of freedom, actuation, sensing and control strategies. Then, these models allow us to seek optimal robots that act in application-defined environments by solving optimization problems once unfeasible.

The warm start of the optimization problems are models that characterize the human biomechanics so as robots are obtained as special and optimized cases of the human biomechanics. The optimization problems can also incorporate models of advanced, sustainable, and smart materials thus leading to optimal robots with high performances and bio-compatible circular lives.

Furthermore, the program addresses the scientific question of how the robot body alters human-robot interaction and social cognition by defining cognitive indexes as cost functions of the optimization problems.

The Monte Porzio team is part of the iFeelHuman team but operates in the joint lab INAIL-IIT located at the INAIL research center in Monte Porzio Catone (Roma).

The work focuses on the human-centric aspects, specifically on the optimization of human models and the development of human musculoskeletal models for use in the analysis of data obtained trough the iFeel technology. Furthermore, the team has been tasked with compiling these data in order to assess the biomechanical risk during certain workplace activities.