News

[10/2024] -

Publication at IROS 2024

Our paper “A Service Robot in the Wild: Analysis of Users Intentions, Robot Behaviors, and Their Impact on the Interaction” will be published at the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024).


[09/2024] -

We hosted HFR 2024 in Lugano!

We organized the 17th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR 2024) in Lugano. It was a nice opportunity to meet and discuss with members of the HRI community. The workshop featured a rich program of 4 keynote speeches, 4 oral sessions with 19 talks, 2 poster sessions, and 3 technical talks from our sponsors. All accepted papers (including two of ours!) have received at least two reviews and will appear in Springer Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR2024).
Check the program on the workshop website to see what it was all about.

[08/2024] -

Publications at HFR 2024

Our two papers, “Learning Hand State Estimation for a Light Exoskeleton” by G. Abbate, A. Giusti, L. Randazzo and A. Paolillo, and “Hearing the Robot’s Mind: Sonification for Explicit Feedback in Human-Robot Interaction” by S. Arreghini, A. Paolillo, G. Abbate and A. Giusti have been accepted at the 17th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR2024).

[05/2024] -

We were at ICRA 2024 in Yokohama!

We joined the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024) which was held in beautiful Yokohama. It was a great opportunity to present our work, get in touch with other researchers and start new collaborations! We also ate a lot of sushi :D

[04/2024] -

Publication at ICRA 2024

Our paper “Predicting the Intention to Interact with a Service Robot: the Role of Gaze Cues” will be published at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024).


[03/2024] -

Publication at HRI 2024

Our paper “A Long-Range Mutual Gaze Detector for HRI” will be published at the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2024).

[12/2023] -

New Article on Scientific Report Journal

Our article “A mirror therapy system using virtual reality and an actuated exoskeleton for the recovery of hand motor impairments: a study of acceptability, usability, and embodiment” has been published on Scientific Report journal.


[12/2023] -

New RA-L Article

Our article “A Sim-to-Real Deep Learning-based Framework for Autonomous Nano-drone Racing” has been published on the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) journal.


[11/2023] -

“Quality of Life” Label!

Our project “Remotely-assisted Enhanced Mirror Therapy (REMiT)” has been awarded with the “Quality of Life” label from the Fondation Dalle Molle. With the VRHEM project we developed a system leveraging VR technology and a hand exoskeleton (provided by emovo) to enahance traditional Mirror Therapy.
With REMiT we build on top of this to unlock telemedicine features: we allow therapists to remotely connect with their patients and supervise the therapy session.

[11/2023] -

New RAS Article

Our article “Self-Supervised Prediction of the Intention to Interact with a Service Robot” has been published on the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) journal.


[11/2022] -

Demo Deployed at Swiss Robotics Days 2022

We were pretty busy during the Swiss Robotics Days 2022. Hundreds of people visited our boot to try our demo. Its ease of use made it accessible and funny even for children :D
Check our research on pointing based interactions!

[09/2022] -

Nanocopter AI Challenge at IMAV22

Our team won the 1st Nanocopter AI Challenge which took place at IMAV2022 in Delft.

[06/2022] -

Innosuisse grant for VRHEM

Our project titled “Virtual Reality and Hand Exoskeleton for Mirror Therapy: a Feasibility Study (VRHEM)” has been granted by Innosuisse - Swiss Innovation Agency

[06/2022] -

Publication at CASE 2022

Our paper “Selecting Objects on Conveyor Belts Using Pointing Gestures Sensed by a Wrist-worn Inertial Measurement Unit” will be published at the 2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).


[05/2022] -

Publication at CIRP 2022

Our paper Towards the integration of a pointing-based human-machine interface in an industrial control system compliant with the IEC 61499 standard” will be published in the Proceedings of the 55th CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems 2022.

[01/2022] -

Publications at HRI 2022

Our works “Interacting with a Conveyor Belt in Virtual Reality using Pointing Gestures” and “PointIt: A ROS Toolkit for Interacting with Co-located Robots using Pointing Gestures” (code here) will be published at the 17th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2022).

[10/2021] -

New PLR Article

Our article “Semantic segmentation on Swiss3DCities: A benchmark study on aerial photogrammetric 3D pointcloud dataset” has been published on the Pattern Recognition Letters (PRL) journal. This is the result of the collaboration we had with Nomoko. Check my related implementation of a 3D Point Cloud Segmentation model.

[03/2021] -

Publication at ICRA 2021

Our paper “Pointing at Moving Robots: Detecting Events from Wrist IMU Data” will be published at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).


[09/2019] -

NeuralRope#1 is Live

The art installation featuring a neural network (implemented by my colleagues and me) running live at the Besso’s tunnel in Lugano is now open.

[05/2019] -

Publication at ICRA 2019

Our paper “Proximity Human-Robot Interaction Using Pointing Gestures and a Wrist-mounted IMU” will be published at the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).


[03/2019] -

Best Video Award at HRI 2019

Our video “Pointing Gestures for Proximity Interaction” got the Best Video Award at the 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI2019). You can find related research here.