Activities

List of the projects

	ROSJava Library. We are experimenting ROSJava library to connect Java to ROS applications, this library is still in alpha version, but is constantly improved. This library paves the way for a clear functional separation amongst what is running on a platform and what is specific for robot. On the platform, ROSJava library can build an interface made of ROS messages talker/listener or server/client, such a messages interface represents the contract between ROS and Java application. On the Robot, all ROS libraries are possible to build specific applications, the interface messages simply need to be published or subscribed. Email Contacts: Roberto Antonini, Marco Gaspardone
	NAO Tris.NAO is able to play Tic Tac Toe game thanks to a remote algorithm deployed to a platform. NAO just needs to be switched on and connected to the platform, once doing this everything works. The only requested NAO functionalities are VideoDevice (for shooting photos of TicTac Toe schema game), TextToSpeech (for interacting with human adversary) and Motion (for pointing next move); those are all native functionalities running on the robot and being connected by the platform to support the Tic Tac Toe algorithm. It’s a very first example on how NAO can exploit a remote process, a first substantial step towards “Cloud Robotics”. Email Contacts: Roberto Antonini, Marco Gaspardone
	ROS implementation of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). The robot is able to build a map of the environment and to estimate its position within the map, using the approach of this paper! The algorithm takes in input the sensor readings from a laser scanner and provides a map of the obstacles and traversable spaces. Application scenarios include mapping of logistic spaces for management or monitoring purposes, as well as mapping of home environments, for situational awareness and domotics applications. Email Contacts: Luca Carlone
	PIANAO (Nao will be able to play simple songs at the piano) Nao Robot learns how to play piano by a human teacher. The robot could be a useful tool for a piano teacher or a teacher himself to improve children’s piano skills and to encourage them to play and enjoying the instrument! From now the robot recognizes the piano keyboard and localizes all the keys and their names analyzing the relative position between 5 black keys. Further work will focus on learning how to press the right keys in order to play a simple song with two hands independently. Email Contacts: Riccardo Levorato
	NAO Impulsive sound localization for Surveillance Applications. Nao listens to impulsive sounds in the environment and localizes the direction of them related to its position. Then the robot can turn his head and go in the direction of the sound detected to control if there are some problems. Email Contacts: Riccardo Levorato
	Autonomous Robotic Monitoring. A new robot prototype has been built to inspect industrial site. This prototype is mainly composed by a Icreate robot and a PC mounted on top of it. It’s sort of robot platform to test new sensors, ranging from laser to sharp nodes; you simply need to connect the PC via WIFI and a simple application running on it, which manages robot and sensors, allows you to build new service logics. Email Contacts: Roberto Antonini, Marco Gaspardone
	ARDrone parrot. A new open source developing community named ARDrone project https://projects.ardrone.org has been building ARParrot games, these games are based on a library exploiting ARDrone SDK. Basing on this library, a ROS community http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/wiki/ardrone_brown has developed the ARDrone driver node: publishing various messages you can take off, land and move the drone; subscribing to apposite topics you can animate classical UI to take under control flight parameters and stream videos captured by cameras installed both front and bottom side, the same way a flight simulator would do. We have installed ROS nodes and everything works well. Email Contacts: Roberto Antonini, Marco Gaspardone
	Robot & LTE. LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and is a very large broadband communication technology with very low latency. Connecting a robot to a service platform with LTE technology dramatically improves the quality of video surveillance services, for instance, where A/V streaming, coming from the camera mounted on the robot, can be received from a teleoperation application in real-time, at this regard, in our laboratory, we are experimenting the LTE connection between Corobot UGV and our service platform to enact a telesurveillance application demo. Let’s imagine an UAV with LTE connection, in case this is not operated by ground station by sight, front camera feedback must be instantaneous (client video player) and laser or infreared sensor must provide data in real-time to obstacle detection system (installed on the platform), otherwise your drone could be damaged, if everything went well. Email Contacts: Roberto Antonini, Marco Gaspardone