Articles in Category: News

Walkman ranked 17th place at DARPA Robotics Challenge

on Monday, 08 June 2015. Posted in News

Walkman, the robot designed by Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Centro "E.Piaggio" ranked in 17th place at the DARPA Robotics Challenge. The robot completed the frist two tasks (driving and opening a door), but its competition was interrupted after teh robot fell while walking throough the door.

Walkman is the acronym of “Whole Body Adaptive Locomotion and Manipulation”: the robot hands are an improved version of the "PISA/IIT Softhand"

IIT and Centro Piaggio Team among the finalists of the Amazon Picking Challenge!

on Wednesday, 08 April 2015. Posted in News

The Team of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Centro "E.Piaggio" of the University of Pisa has been selected to participate to the final stage of the Amazon Picking Challenge, that will be held at ICRA 2015, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s flagship conference.

The goal is to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to some of the big problems in unstructured automation. To this end the contest will be awarding travel grants to ICRA 2015, practice equipment, and a large prize pool for the competition winners (through Amazon, in additional to any other IEEE or ICRA grants).

Entrants are building their own robot hardware and software that can attempt simplified versions of the general task of picking items from shelves. The robots will be presented with a stationary, lightly populated Kiva inventory shelf and be asked to pick a subset of the products and put them on a table.

The challenge combines object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and recovery. The robots will be scored by how many items are picked in a fixed amount of time, with $26,000 in prizes being awarded. Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations.

IIT and Centro Piaggio will participate to the competition with the "pisa-iit Softhand"

Best Poster Award @EuroHaptics 2014

on Wednesday, 05 November 2014. Posted in News

Best Poster Award @EuroHaptics 2014
Alessandro Moscatelli, Matteo Bianchi, Alessandro Serio, Omar Al Atassi, Simone Fani, Alexander Terekhov, Vincent Hayward, Marc Ernst and Antonio Bicchi.
"A change in the fingertip contact area induces an illusory displacement of the finger"
June 24-27 2014, Versailles, France

Manuel Catalano wins the Georges Giralt Award!

on Wednesday, 05 November 2014. Posted in News

An Italian doctoral graduate has won an honor for the best thesis on robotics in Europe. Manuel Catalano, of the University of Pisa, won the Georges Giralt Award for his study into a new generation of robots that take on human-like movements by adapting their body to the surrounding environment, thanks to special motors called variable impedance actuators (VIA).

His research was instrumental to the development of the Pisa-Iit Softhand, a robotic hand that has potential in the world of prosthetics.

catalano rid

Best paper Award at Humanoids 2012

on Thursday, 06 December 2012. Posted in News

the award went to the research team of IIT and Centro "E.Piaggio"

The paper Adaptive Synergies for a Humanoid Robot Hand (Manuel Catalano, Giorgio Grioli, Alessandro Serio, Edoardo Farnioli, Cristina Piazza, Antonio Bicchi) won the Best Paper Award at the 2012 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2012).

The paper is the result of a collaboration between the Italian Institute of technology and the Research Center "E.Piaggio"

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