Davide Ortenzi

AAL Technologies for Independent Life of Elderly People

Assistive technologies have the objective to improve the people quality of life of in daily living, with a special aim to those who suffer of physical disabilities or cognitive impairment, which may be caused by an accident, disease or the natural process of ageing. The present paper describes the main results of a study realized for the INTERREG IVC INNOVAGE project, where the domain target addressed are: home and building automation and assistive robotics. The project provides a quick overview of the typical needs of elderly people, describes the state-of-the-art technologies which can be adopted to satisfy these needs and presents a critical analysis of the functionalities, which present and future assistive technologies should possess. The result of this study is a detailed assessments of requirements and limits of nowadays domotics and robotics technologies aimed to improve people quality of life.

Redundancy analysis of cooperative dual-arm manipulators

This paper presents the redundancy analysis of two cooperative manipulators, showing how they can be considered as a single redundant manipulator through the use of the relative Jacobian matrix. In this way, the kinematic redundancy can be resolved by applying the principal local optimization techniques used in the single manipulator case. We resolve the redundancy by using the Jacobian null space technique, which permits us to perform several tasks with different execution priority levels at the same time; this is a useful feature, especially when the manipulators are to be mounted on and cooperate with a mobile platform. As an illustrative example, we present a case study consisting of two planar manipulators mounted on a smart wheelchair, whose degrees of redundancy are employed to move an object along a pre-defined path, while avoiding an obstacle in the manipulator’s workspace at the same time.

Low Cost RGB-D Vision Based System to Support Motor Disabilities Rehabilitation at Home

Physical rehabilitation is an important medical activity sector for the recovery of physical functions and clinical treatment of people affected by different pathologies, as neurodegenerative diseases (i.e. multiple sclerosis, Parkinson and Alzheimer diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), neuromuscular disorders (i.e. dystrophies, myopathies, amyotrophies and neuropathies), neurovascular disorders/trauma (i.e. stroke and traumatic brain injuries), and mobility for the elderly. During the rehabilitation, the patient has to perform different exercises specific for the own disease: while some exercises have to be performed with specific equipment and under the supervision of professional staff, others can be performed by patients without the supervision of physiotherapists. In this last case, it is possible to reduce the costs of health and care national system and to accomplish the treatment at home. In this work, a computer vision system for physical rehabilitation at home is proposed. The vision system exploits a low cost RGB-D camera and open source libraries for the image processing, in order to monitor the exercises performed by the patients, and returns a video feedback to improve the treatment effectiveness and to increase the user’s motivation, interest, and perseverance. Moreover, the vision system evaluates an exercise score in order to monitor the rehabilitation progress, an helpful information both for the clinician staff and patients, and allow physiotherapists to monitor the patients at home and correct their posture if the exercises are not well performed. This approach has been implemented and experimentally tested using the Microsoft Kinect camera, demonstrating good and reliable performances.

Dual-arm cooperative manipulation under joint limit constraints

Abstract Cooperative manipulation of a rigid object is challenging and represents an interesting and active research area, especially when these robots are subject to joint and task prioritization constraints. In cooperative manipulation, a primary task is to maintain the coordination of motions, to avoid severe damage caused by the violation of kinematic constraints imposed by the closed chain mechanism. This paper proposes a kinematic controller for dual-arm cooperative manipulation that ensures safety by providing relative coordinated motion as highest priority task and joint limit avoidance and world-space trajectory following at a lower priority. The coordination of motions is based on modular relative Jacobian formulation. The approach is applicable to systems composed of redundant or non-redundant manipulators. Experiments in simulation demonstrate the behavior of the approach under different redundancy configurations. Experiments on two robots with different number of redundant motions show the applicability of the proposed approach to cooperative manipulation under joint limit constraints.

Preliminary Study of a Novel Shelving System for Nutrition Habits Measuring

Nutrition plays a key role in both the prevention of several critical diseases and lead an healthier life in the modern society. In order to analyse household’s eating habits in the Italian scenario, authors propose the design of an innovative system called “Smart Shelve”. This system consists in a robotic structure integrable with various appliances, such as refrigerators, which allows to receive and deliver several types of foods in order to control their daily consumption. Smart Shelve is equipped with external optical sensors for food recognition, while inside it is composed of several food compartments in which load cells measure the weight of each type of food. The system is capable to warn the users who have recently conducted an incorrect style. The system is also able to send the acquired food consumption information to the cloud in order to provide statistical services regarding the nutrition style of clusters of users localized in a specific geographical area (e.g. district or region).

A low cost mobile platform for educational robotic applications

This paper proposes a low cost mobile platform for robotic applications which is mainly addressed to educators and developers. Most of robotic models in the market use USB or serial standard protocol to retrieve sensor information, and this can generate delays on sensor readings and degradation of the overall performances. The proposed mobile robotic platform is based instead on the Controller Area Network, namely CAN-bus, which permits to obtain high performances and to increase flexibility and expandability for future technology integration.