• Optical and Spectroscopic techniques are developed and appliced to industrial processes like for example in the processing and selection for recycling of waste materials.

Homepage: http://www.plastickiller.eu/homepage/People: Piergiorgio Nicolosi (contact person)

• Runtime compression of biometric time series.
• Efficient compression/transmission of data over wireless channels.
• Motion analysis: gait analysis from smartphone and wristband motion data, user identification and pattern analysis for preventive healthcare applications.
• Activity recognition and behavioral profiling from motion sensors.

Particular attention is paid to the role of robotics in education. The Research group is actively involved in several projects that aim to introduce robots in the curricular didactics. In particular, the group proposes education courses for teachers oriented to robotics-enhanced constructivist learning theory in primary and secondary schools, in order to enable teachers to implement robotics-enhanced constructivist learning in school classrooms:

Brain-Machine Interfaces and  Human-Machine Interfaces based on Neuromusculoskeletal models are the two major research topics on Neurorobotics. In particular, the research group focuses on developing new wearable devices to acquire, process and classify neuro-signals to control assistive robots for disable users. with the goal of improving the current neuro-motor rehabilitation processes.

In the last years, service robots and their interaction with humans have acquired particular interest. The Research group investigates robot bipedal locomotion and walking-gait programming in simulated and real situations in order to enhance the coupling between Human and Robot. Particular interest is dedicated to the study of Human-Robot and Robot-Robot Interaction.

The Intelligent Robotics Research group focuses on developing efficient collision and obstacle avoidance algorithms for autonomous robots to safely move through an unstructured environment. Our algorithms are based on the discretization of generic movement paths into optimized subsets that satisfied surrounding constraints.

The Research group has an extensive knowledge of the issues related to the use of industrial robots for production. In this context, it is active in robotized visual inspection for quality and completeness control, real-time programming of robotic workcells and computationally efficient algorithms for grasping, assembling and task planning that can be used to program the next generation of industrial robots.

This research activity aims at exploiting vision data for making robots safe and ready for real world applications. The image processing algorithms, developed by the group, rely on information from RGB-D cameras and allow robots to safely act in different environments, to quickly detect people and to track objects and humans and recognize their gestures and actions.

Microfluidic systems are currently used in the form of Lab-on-chip (LoC) in the medical and biomedical domains to realize a number of processes, from DNA analysis to cellular synthesis. This research topic aims at developing purely hydrodynamic modules to interconnect microfluidics LoCs in more complex networks and to study the possibility of using this technology to carry information.