This doctoral thesis navigates the complex landscape of motion coordination and formation control within teams of rotary-wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Prompted by the intricate demands of real-world applications such as search and rescue or surveillan ...
Tactile perception of softness serves a critical role in the survival, well-being, and social interaction among various species, including humans. This perception informs activities from food selection in animals to medical palpation for disease detection ...
For the dimensioning and assessment of structures, it is common practice to compare action effects with sectional resistances. Extensive studies have been performed to quantify the model uncertainty on the resistance side. However, for statically indetermi ...
Decisions about a current visual stimulus are systematically biased by recently encountered stimuli, a phenomenon known as serial dependence. In human vision, for instance, we tend to report the features of current images as more similar â i.e., an attra ...
Operators from various industries have been pushing the adoption of wireless sensing nodes for industrial monitoring, and such efforts have produced sizeable condition monitoring datasets that can be used to build diagnosis algorithms capable of warning ma ...
Navigation of drones is predominantly based on sensor fusion algorithms. Most of these algorithms make use of some form of Bayesian filtering with a majority employing an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), wherein inertial measurements are fused with a Global N ...
There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...
Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...
Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...
Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...
Programming intelligent robots requires robust controllers that can achieve desired tasks while adapting to the changes in the task and the environment. In this thesis, we address the challenges in designing such adaptive and anticipatory feedback controll ...