RECCHIUTO C.

In the intelligent vehicles community, exploring and navigating through urban environments represent one of the greatest challenges to overcome. This challenge can be addressed using Vehicle-To-Everything technologies which enable connected vehicles to communicate with each other and with other actors in the scenario such as smart...

In the intelligent vehicles community, exploring and navigating through urban environments represent one of the greatest challenges to overcome. This challenge can be addressed using Vehicle-To-Everything technologies which enable connected vehicles to communicate with each other and with other actors in the scenario such as smart...

A common way to organize a high number of robots, both when moving autonomously and when controlled by a human operator, is to let them move in formation. This is a principle that takes inspiration from the nature, that maximizes the possibility of monitoring the environment and therefore of anticipating risks and finding targets. In robotics,...

Embedding social robots with the capability of accompanying their sentences with natural gestures may be the key to increasing their acceptability and their usage in real contexts. However, the definition of natural communicative gestures may not be trivial, since it strictly depends on the culture of the person interacting with the robot. The...

This article describes a novel approach to expand in run-time the knowledge base of an Artificial Conversational Agent. A technique for automatic knowledge extraction from the user's sentence and four methods to insert the new acquired concepts in the knowledge base have been developed and integrated into a system that has already been tested...

Rescue operations taking place in disaster settings can be fraught with ethical challenges. Further ethical challenges will likely be introduced by the use of robots, which are expected to soon become commonplace in search and rescue missions and disaster recovery efforts. To help focus timely reflection on the ethical considerations associated...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) popularity is increased in recent years, and the domain of application of this new technology is continuously expanding. However, although UAVs may be extremely useful in monitoring contexts, the operational aspects of drone patrolling services have not yet been extensively studied. Specifically, patrolling and...

The article describes the implementation of a collaborative approach for localization and mapping of large urban environments. This approach foresees the presence of multiple human operators, endowed with wearable sensors, whose outputs are processed in real-time in order to estimate human odometry. A Graph-based CLAM approach, generating a...

The article proposes a system for knowledge-based conversation designed for Social Robots and other conversational agents. The proposed system relies on an Ontology for the description of all concepts that may be relevant conversation topics, as well as their mutual relationships. The article focuses on the algorithm for Dialogue Management...

Embedding social robots with the capability of accompanying their sentences with natural gestures may be the key to increasing their acceptability and their usage in real contexts. However, it could be argued that the definition of natural communicative gestures is not trivial, since it strictly depends on the culture of the person interacting...

This work presents the design and the implementation of CAIR: a cloud system for knowledge-based interaction devised for Social Robots and other conversational agents. The system is structured in a way that it can be easily expanded by adding new services that improve the capabilities of the clients connected to the Cloud. Another key feature...

The study of verbal interaction between multiple humans and robots is an almost unexplored research field. This kind of interaction has been primarily analyzed in the literature focusing on cooperation to achieve a common task or on more technical aspects such as active speaker recognition. The presented work proposes a holistic approach to...

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems are devoted to identifying, amidst the sensory stream provided by one or more sensors located so that they can monitor the actions of a person, portions related to the execution of a number of a-priori defined activities of interest. Improving the performance of systems for Human Activity Recognition is...

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Rescue robots are expected to soon become commonplace at disaster sites, where they are increasingly being deployed to provide rescuers with improved access and intervention capabilities while mitigating risks. The presence of robots in operation areas, however, is likely to carry a layer of additional ethical complexity to situations that are...

In recent years autonomous robots, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in particular, are becoming always more important in the context of emergency scenarios, being able to anticipate the actions of human operators and to support them during rescue operations. In this context, the investigation of strategies for the autonomous control of UAVs,...

Personality is one of the most important factors in human interactions, which retains its importance in human- robot interactions with social robots. This work focusses on the varied linguistic strategies which characterize the personality traits of extraversion and introversion, analysing the main features that differentiate both personalities...

As robots become part of our everyday lives, they may be required to cooperate without being aware of each other's capabilities (e.g., because different teams have developed them), and therefore will have to trust each other to work together safely and efficiently. Starting from this premise, this work identifies trust as an essential metric to...

The article focusses on the work performed in preparation for an experimental trial aimed at evaluating the impact of a culturally competent robot for care home assistance. Indeed, it has been estabilished that the user's cultural identity plays an important role during the interaction with a robotic system and cultural competence may be one of...

In the biped robotics domain, head oscillations may be extremely harmful, especially if the robot is teleoperated, since vibrations strongly reduce the operator's spatial awareness. In particular, undesired head oscillations occur in under-actuated robots, where springs and passive mechanisms are used to achieve a human-like motion. This paper...

Multirotor drones are becoming increasingly popular in a number of application fields, with a unique appeal to the scientific community and the general public. Applications include security, monitoring and surveillance, environmental mapping, and emergency scenario management: in all these areas, two of the main issues to address are the...