When: Monday 10th December, 13:00 – 14:00

Where: ATB2203, Alfred Tennyson Building (previously MHT)

Transferring human hand skills to robotic hands

Abstract

This is an exciting and pivotal moment in the history of robotics. As the gap between theoretical research and fully-fledged technology continues to close, important advances from mechanical design to decision algorithms are enabling robots to reliably carry out more complex tasks than ever before, unlocking an enormous potential for new applications. Once confined into cages, robots are quickly entering in the user workspace at different levels. In this talk, I will mainly focus on intelligent human-centred robotics. In particular, I will show strategies to transfer human manipulation skills onto robots so to let robots act in unstructured and unknown environments both in autonomous and in a teleoperation framework. I will also show how soft robotics can enhance safety in physical human-robot cooperation and how this can be exploited for the design of assistive device and novel soft-grippers. Finally, I will focus on how haptics, and more in particular wearable haptics, can play a great role in connecting human and robots.

Short biography:

Gionata Salvietti received the M.S. degree in Robotics and Automation and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Siena, Siena, Italy, in 2009 and 2012, respectively. He was a post-doc researcher with the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia from 2012 to 2015. He was Visiting Researcher with the DLR Institute for Robotic and Mechatronics, in 2012 and a Visiting Student with TAMS Group, University of Hamburg, in 2008. He is currently Assistant Professor at Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena. His research interests are robotic and human grasping, assistive devices, and haptics.