Research Projects
Digital Analytics and Robotics for Sustainable Forestry (Digiforest)
Funding Body: Horizon Europe
Duration : 01/09/2022 – 28/02/2026
Status: Active
The mission of Digiforest is to develop the technology needed to achieve sustainable digital forestry. The following outlines four scientific ambitions which form the basis of our project.
They include fundamental development for (1) mobile robotic navigation (multi-sensor motion estimation, 3D mission planning) and (2) data-driven semantic mapping. (3) This highly detailed data will be presented to a human supervisor, enabling him/her to make informed decisions and (4) to plan the deployment of a mobile robot harvester to selectively intervene in an environmental manner.
For more information, please visit: digiforest.eu
Physical Cognition for Intelligent Control and Safe Human-Robot Interaction (SESTOSENSO)
Funding Body: Horizon Europe
Duration : 01/10/2022 – 30/09/2025
Status: Active
Project Description:
Sestosenso develops technologies for next generations of collaborative robots capable of self-adapting to different time-varying operational conditions and capable of safe and smooth adaptation from autonomous to interactive when human intervention is required either for collaboration or training/teaching.
The project proposes a new sensing technology from the hardware and up to the cognitive perception and control levels, based on networks of embedded proximity and tactile sensors on the robot body, providing a unified proxy-tactile perception of the environment, required to control the robot actions and interactions, safely and autonomously. Within the project, the same technologies are also applied to wearable devices (like exoskeletons) to provide the user with better spatial awareness and to enforce safety in critical human-robot interactive tasks.
For more information, please visit: sestosenso.eu
Reconfigurable Collaborative Agri-Robots (Recoaro)
Funding Body: Research Südtirol/Alto Adige 2019
Duration : 01/10/2020 – 31/12/2023
Status: Active
Project Description:
This project involves the development of Modular reconfigurable robots (MRRs). MRRs are composed of interchangeable mechatronic modules that can be rearranged to adapt a robot to operate under new circumstances, perform different tasks, or recover from damage. It is anticipated the situations in which manually reconfigured MRRs will be deployed require the use of semi-automatic shared human-robot control. This work will involve developing a shared trajectory-tracking control system for an MRR.
SPRUCE-ROBOT: Smart PRUning and Climbing treEs ROBOT
Funding Body: CRC CALL 2018
Budget: 100.000 euro
Duration : 3 years
Status: Active
Project Description:
The project aims to design a climbing robot for pruning spruce trees without damaging the bark. According to the requirements and pruning methods for avoiding the flaws of the finished timber, guidelines and constraints for the mechatronic design of a new climbing robot for spruce-pruning activities were deduced. The preliminary scaled mechatronic prototype is experimentally evaluated on poles with diameters in the range of the young spruces, i.e., 100–200 mm, in its main climbing features. These results will serve as the basis for the system’s further development.