Robotics
"Robots! Robots on Mars and in oceans, in hospitals and homes, in factories and schools; robots fighting fires, making goods and products, saving time and lives . . ."
— Handbook of Robotics
Robots... in oceans
MARINE ROBOTICS was the initial approach to Robotics for the MDM Lab back in 2010, when the first Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) was designed from scratch. AUVs are unmanned, untethered, battery-powered robots used for various purposes, including creating ocean floor maps, collecting water conditions data, monitoring climate change's effects on flora, fauna and coastal erosion, automatically detecting objects of interest, and performing manipulation tasks.
Over the years, MDM Lab has designed and built several models of AUVs, each with different features and applications. All aspects of the prototype design have been performed in-house, from mechanics, electronics, and sensor integration to autonomous navigation, perception, and control algorithms. Current research activities focus on the topics of:
- accurate autonomous underwater navigation
- AI-based automatic target recognition
- autonomous coverage
Robots... in hospitals
MDM Lab started working on HEALTHCARE ROBOTICS in 2013 in response to a request to develop a hand exoskeleton for assistive purposes. So, we started a journey in Wearable Robotics for assistance and rehabilitation, discovering how hand disability represents a mission that is as important for people's quality of life as it is challenging from the research perspective.
Since 2013, many hand exoskeleton prototypes have been developed, taking care of their design, control, testing, acceptability and usability analysis. Wearable Robotics places extremely stringent requirements on weight, encumbrance, comfort, intuitiveness of use, and safety. All these aspects are the subject of the MDM Lab's research activities, where they are investigated by working on:
Robots... in factories
Robots... saving time and life
CONTACTS:
Prof. Benedetto Allotta <benedetto.allotta@unifi.it>
Dr. Alessandro Ridolfi <alessandro.ridolfi@unifi.it>
Dr. Nicola Secciani <nicola.secciani@unifi.it>
Our labs
...
> publications
> laboratories
> courses and exams
> ongoing projects and collaborations
Ultimo aggiornamento
22.05.2024