Hamilton Institute Seminar

Wednesday, May 25, 2022 - 13:00 to 14:00
Online & In-person

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88018185733?pwd=OEcxb2ZSYUwzV2hWTE9wcE1yTWRUQT09
Passcode: 279596

In-person: Hamilton Institute Seminar room (317), 3rd Floor Eolas Building, North Campus, Maynooth University

Speaker: Dr Marco Cognetti, Maynooth University

Title: "Planning, perception and control for mobile robots"

Abstract: In this talk, we will focus on two main research topics: motion planning for humanoid robots and localization of ground and aerial vehicles. The former is a challenging problem for several reasons. For example, a humanoid has typically a high number of degrees of freedom, making the problem of generating the robot motion computationally expansive. Moreover, it should always maintain equilibrium, constraining its movements. We will propose an approach that expands a tree in the configuration space of the robot, using a predefined set of primitives for the robot center of mass that reduces the configuration space dimensionality. We will show how the robot is able to fulfill navigation and manipulation tasks using this approach. Regarding the second topic, the active perception problem will be formulated as finding the optimal controls for the robot such that the estimation uncertainty from a filter is minimized. The connection between a metric called Constructibility Gramian and the inverse of the covariance matrix of the filter will show that maximizing the smallest eigenvalue of the Gramian is equivalent to minimize the estimation uncertainty. Results involving ground robots and drones will be shown. Finally, the problem of localizing a team of robots will be faced fusing geometric algorithms and particles filters in order to retrieve the relative poses of the robots.

Bio: Marco Cognetti is a Lecturer at the Department of Electronic Engineering at Maynooth University from September 2020. In 2020, he was a Postdoctoral researcher at the UBICOMP department of the University of Oulu, Finland, working with Prof. Steven LaValle and, in 2017-2019 he was a Postdoctoral researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Irisa and Inria Rennes, working with Dr. Paolo Robuffo Giordano. In 2015, he visited the Personal Robotics Lab at "The Robotics Institute – Carnegie Mellon University" under the supervision of Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa and, in 2011, he visited the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen under the supervision of Prof. Antonio Franchi.