Mauro Bellone: Roboticist, entrepreneur and innovation technologies specialist
" we are part of a 10 billion people brain
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Dynamic fleet mission planning
This video illustrates our dynamic fleet mission planning method on topological maps, for autonomous underground mining operation. The video shows, at 20x the actual speed, the first hour of a four-hour shift in the mine shown in the figure below.
Vehicles that reach a terminal (either a loading site or an offloading site) can request re-optimization, once they have completed their stationary activity (loading or offloading). At that point, the GA-based optimizer generates a new mission for the vehicle in question, while also (potentially) modifying the missions of the other vehicles. Thus, the planning method must be able to handle the fact that vehicles move during optimization and must make sure to maintain causaility, by only making changes in those parts of the missions that lie beyond the end time of the optimization procedure.
Note also that the video has been speeded up by a factor 20. The actual traversal times are on the order of 7 - 15 minutes. For this rather small mine map, with a single off-loading station, 4-5 vehicles is close to the upper limit of what is reasonable. However, in bigger maps, the fleet mission optimizer can handle larger number of vehicles as well. More information available on the Adaptive systems research group web page.
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Development of a Serious Game to Enhance Assistive Rehabilitation
The aim of this study to investigate of novel assistive technologies based on serious gaming for the assessment of postural control and motor rehabilitation. Previous research already demonstrated that rehabilitation, assistive technologies, and physical activities can improve the quality of life of patients, and virtual reality applications may act as good additional companions during the therapeutic sessions. Indeed, workout routines supported by serious gaming encourage patients to train harder, bringing the therapy towards a pleasant game into a virtual environment, where specific goals must be reached. During the game, sensors track the movements of the players and transfer the data to software components that record a database from which patients’ progress can be determined. The acquired measures are interpreted in the form of new biomarkers, which enable the assessment of postural control. Such biomarkers are based on a probabilistic approach and show the capability to discriminate between well-performed exercises and incorrect movements. A long-term experimentation on a specific exercise is proposed, showing a considerable improvement, ranging from 5% to 30%, in the performance of patients .
The main contributions of this research are: i) the definition of new biomarkers for the postural assessment of patients affected by motor disorders; ii) the use of non-intrusive technologies, which enhances the freedom of movement for patients, increasing the reliability of the results; iii) the design of a virtual reality interface, which allows patients to interact in a pleasant and familiar environment without constant supervision; iv) the development of a new editor to easily customize virtual exercises, analyze rehabilitation progress, and create statistics.
M. Bellone, A, Martini, F. Argese, P. Cirillo, I. Spada, and A. Cerasa - "Development of a Serious Game to Enhance Assistive Rehabilitation" International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics - (in press) [DRAFT soon] |
Sohjoa Baltic - Bringing autonomous and eco-friendly public transportation into cities
Glad to be part of Sohjoa Baltic, an Interreg EU-funded project that aims to facilitate the transition to autonomous and eco-friendly public transport in the cities around the Baltic Sea. Sohjoa Baltic researches, promotes and pilots automated driverless electric minibuses as part of the public transport chain, especially for the first/last mile connectivity. The project brings knowledge and competence on organizing environmentally friendly and smart automated public transport. It also provides guidelines on legal and organizational setup needed for running such a service in an efficient way. Sohjoa Baltic projects brings autonomous small buses to drive demo routes in six Baltic Sea Region cities in the following years. The project involves 13 partners across 8 countries. Chalmers will, among other things, contribute with knowledge of vehicle engineering, autonomous technical development, intelligent cooperative driving behavior and risk analysis.
Read more here and ( på svenska ) ![]() |
Labonatip 2.0
The Lab-on-a-tip is a new open-source cross-platform software that enables facile configuration and use of the Fluicell BioPen system. The BioPen software enable independent control of each pressure line and solution delivery. Lab-on-a-tip is based on QT5 library and released under the terms of the GNU GPL license. See more on GitHub |
Extension of Trajectory Planning in Parameterized Spaces to Articulated Vehicles
The main objective of this research is to study a novel method for safe maneuvering of articulated vehicles in warehouses. The presented method extends the concept of probabilistic planning on manifolds to articulated vehicles, which will be capable of driving, maneuvering and performing obstacle avoidance in any scenario. The proposed technique involves the extension of a parameterized space, developed for the reactive navigation of differential driven vehicles, to include an additional degree of freedom and use a probabilistic planner to calculate kinematically feasible trajectories. As a result, the algorithm is able to successfully generate maneuvers for an articulated truck and to navigate towards specific target points. The approach was validated using three problems representing different driving scenarios, demonstrating the possible utilization of the method in real-case scenarios. The solutions have been further benchmarked on multiple runs to evaluate success rate and to demonstrate the validity of the algorithm. M. Bellone, and J. Qutteineh - "Extension of Trajectory Planning in Parameterized Spaces to Articulated Vehicles" - Proceedings of the 2017 22nd IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation; ETFA2017 [ draft ] |
The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge - GCDC2016
It works !! is good !!! The first time I heard this words in the truck I was so exited. Our autonomous driving truck is the result of months of hard work made by the entire Chalmers Truck team for the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge GCDC 2016. What we achieved and what we all learned from this work has been incredible, thanks to the entire team, including who is not in this picture. |
Simulation of a Laser based Driving Assistance for Smart Robotic Wheelchairs
This paper is presenting the ongoing work toward a novel driving assistance system of a robotic wheelchair, for people paralyzed from down the neck. The user’s head posture is tracked, to accordingly project a colored spot on the ground ahead, with a pan-tilt mounted laser. The laser dot on the ground represents a potential close range destination the operator wants to reach autonomously. The wheelchair is equipped with a low cost depth-camera (Kinect sensor) that models a traversability map in order to define if the designated destination is reachable or not by the chair. If reachable, the red laser dot turns green, and the operator can validate the wheelchair destination via an Electromyogram (EMG) device, detecting a specific group of muscle’s contraction. This validating action triggers the calculation of a path toward the laser pointed target, based on the traversability map. The wheelchair is then controlled to follow this path autonomously. In the future, the stream of 3D point cloud acquired during the process will be used to map and self localize the wheelchair in the environment, to be able to correct the estimate of the pose derived from the wheel’s encoders. E. Rohmer, M. Bellone, P. Pinheiro and E. Cardozo and G. Reina - "Laser based Driving Assistance for Smart Robotic Wheelchairs" - 20th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation September 8-11, 2015, Luxembourg [ RG ];
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Ants on the way . . .
![]() We are ants ! and we silently and stubbornly work to change the future!
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Demonstration of immersive reality technologies for design review
Along with CETMA - Area DIM there is a high active work on virtual reality and immersive systems |
New Traversability demo released
Try my new demo for traversability analysis in agricultural robotics:
This application allows to load a single points cloud or a dataset, try filtering methods, frame reference transformations and traversability analysis. Follow using instructions here. |