Hands-Free is a ROS-based software to teleoperate a robot with the user hand. The skeleton of the hand is extracted by using OpenPose and the position of the user’s index finger in the user workspace is mapped to the corresponding robot position in the robot workspace.
The project is available on GitHub and the paper has been published in the Ubiquitous Robotics 2020 virtual conference proceedings.
Cristina Nuzzi, Stefano Ghidini, Roberto Pagani, and Federica Ragni, a team of DRIMI Applied Mechanics Ph. D. Students, participated in the Student Competition of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
Their project, called “RemindLy“, has been published in the conference proceedings and it is available at the ACM library.
This video has also been selected by IEEE SPECTRUM weekly video selection on Robotics and published online!
A new collaboration with the Cajal Institute in Madrid has just begun: this time our students Pietro and Marco will be involved in a project called CADENCE.
CADENCE is a project that will evaluate the H2 exoskeleton of Toledo hospital using the instrumented crutches developed in our laboratory. They will help users to maintain balance and at the same time provide values of force directly related to ground reactions.
The project will involve healthy users, who will be guided by audio feedback, allowing them to step on when they reach a specific force threshold on the crutches. In this way, we hope to reproduce the movements of a paraplegic exoskeleton user.
The target metrics chosen are the forces at the ground (provided thanks to the instrumented crutches), the kinematics of the user and the spatio-temporal parameters of gait, acquired using a Vicon system and reflective markers on the exoskeleton and its pilot.
The experiment will be performed with the assistance of Technaid (Arganda del Rey), and CSIS (Madrid), where our students will spend the summer.
Despite the uncertain weather conditions, the TRAP-Lab and BRaIN teams had an intense day of testing. The new motion capture system, installed experimentally at the TRAP CONCAVERDE field in Lonato del Garda, allows to measure the kinematics and dynamics of the athlete, both before and during the shooting action. The exploratory test will allow to evaluate the system’s reliability and the measurements’ accuracy.
This month we presented our work on Machine Learning used to assess Rolling Contact Fatigue damage progression in two different conference: IMEKO International Metrology Confederation) and ISMA (International Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference).
At the IMEKO in Belfast we presented the results of our project focused on vibrations as a tool to characterize materials.
At the ISMA in Leuven we introduced the preliminary results of the addition of an high-speed camera to our measurement system, to monitor in real-time the specimen surface.
For more information on this project: matteo.lancini@unibs.it
First Semester is now starting in Brescia, but some of our master students are currently in Paris for their exchange semester at the University Pierre et Marie Curie.
Good luck and good work to all: have fun, but also make new experiences and develop skills to take back to your work in our lab!
In the first year of master at “rehabilitation” course in human science motion of Groningen University students are invited to experience directly the tools that are going to be key of their studies, in a funny and at the same time pragmatic way, to understand the difficulties that occur to people who use these tools daily, also in sports.
Our students Paolo and Ridi, working there, had the pleasure to participate and understand this context in a conscientious and recreative way.
First hand experience on what you are working on is important: every time you design a measurement system it’s best to understand deeply the subject beforehand.
We are working side by side with Groningen University to validate a new ergometer for persons and athletes in wheelchairs.
The device was developed by Groningen University and Lode: Servo engines, together with a load cell run on a feedback loop with a biomechanical model to reproduce overground behaviour.
MMTLab is involved with two of our master students, Paolo and Ridi, to design the calibration setup to validate the ergometer and understand its measurement accuracy in different conditions.
http://www.rug.nl/news-and-events/news/archief2016/nieuwsberichten/0518-unifocusvegter
This week we will be both at EFTA in Turin and at IMEKO in Belfast, to present results from two projects followed jointly by MMTLab and Vis4Mech.
During the summer our staff, including our Bachelor Student Marcello, went to Madrid, to work at a joint project on exoskeleton evaluation with the Cajal Institute. Here you can find some photos of our preliminary tests: more info on the project will be posted in the next days.
