SAPHARI

The research unit UNIROMA1 at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale (DIAG) of Sapienza Università di Roma is committed to the development and experimental validation of advanced planning and control techniques for industrial and service robots. The group includes four faculty members, one post-doc member, and three Ph.D. students. The research activity of the DIAG Robotics Laboratory (www.dis.uniroma1.it/labrob) has dealt with motion planning and model- or sensor-based control of manipulators with joint or link flexibility, kinematically redundant robotic systems, wheeled and legged mobile robots, non-holonomic mechanical systems. We developed a range of techniques in nonlinear control, iterative learning, hybrid force-motion control, graph search methods, optimal control, sensor fusion, randomised motion planning and cooperative exploration. Research has been funded through projects supported by the EU (ESPRIT-BRA project PROMotion, IST STREP project CyberWalk, FP6 STREP PHRIENDS) and by several national agencies.

Key researchers

Alessandro DE LUCA (http://www.diag.uniroma1.it/~deluca) is Full Professor of Industrial Robotics and Automatic Control at DIAG, Sapienza Università di Roma since 2000. He has published over 160 papers in journals, books, and conferences on modelling, planning, and control of robotic systems and co-edited one book. He has been an Associate Editor (1994-98) and an Editor (1998-2003) of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and then the Editor-in-Chief (2003-08) of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. In 2005, he received the German Helmholtz-Humboldt Research Award for foreign scientists. Since 2006, he is member of the Search Committee of the Körber European Science Award. He was General Chair of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA07) and is an IEEE Fellow since 2007. He chairs (2009, 2011) Panel PE7 (Systems and Communication Engineering) of the European Research Council (ERC) for the Advanced Grants evaluation. He was principal investigator in the EU projects PROMotion, CyberWalk, and PHRIENDS, and national coordinator of the MIUR project SICURA.

Giuseppe ORIOLO (http://www.diag.uniroma1.it/~oriolo) is Associate Professor of Automatic Control at DIAG since 1998. From 2001 to 2005 He was an Associate Editor (2001-05) of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and is now an Editor (2009-14) of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He was Organization Chair of ICRA07 and is a Senior Member of the IEEE. His research interests are in robot control, motion planning, trajectory planning, redundant robotic systems, control of underactuated and nonholonomic systems, sensor-based localisation, navigation and perception for mobile robots, humanoid robots, and visual servoing. He published over 110 papers in international journals and conferences and co-authored two books.

Marilena VENDITTELLI (http://www.diag.uniroma1.it/~venditt) is an Assistant Professor at DIAG since 2001. In 1995-96, she was visiting scholar at CNRA-LAAS in Toulouse, where she held afterwards a two-year post-doc position funded by the EC through a TMR Marie Curie Grant. She is an Associate Editor (2010-13) of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and was Registration Chair of ICRA07. Her research interests are in the area of robot motion planning and control, with particular emphasis on nonholonomic and redundant systems, navigation and perception for mobile robots, multi-robot exploration.