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"

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"

Arash Ajoudani among the Georges Giralt Award Finalists 2015 with the thesis "Transferring Human Impedance Regulation SkillsTo Robots", introducing novel thinking and techniques to the control of robotic manipulation.

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.

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