Meet our first ESRs and find out more about their projects:
Eugenio Cuniato (ESR3)
Eugenio received an MSc degree in Automation Engineering from University of Naples Federico II in 2021. During his studies, he focused on linear and nonlinear control of robotic systems, especially manipulators and aerial vehicles. He is now pursuing a Ph.D. degree at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. His area of research includes control of aerial manipulators for high-performance aerial physical interaction.
Eugenio's project focuses on full-body control of an interactive aerial robot devoted for physical interaction. The goal is to realize an aerial manipulator capable of safe and stable interaction with potentially unknown environments. Among the objectives of the project, there are: development of an accurate model including the dynamics of both the arm and the aerial base; exploiting the model to obtain high-performance position and interaction control of the aerial manipulator; high-accuracy estimation of the interaction forces.
Antonia Hüfner (ESR 11)
Antonia received her BSc in Engineering Science and her MSc in Mechatronics and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2016 and 2019, respectively. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. Her main research interest is in uncertainty-aware perception for autonomous robots to enable them to navigate within and interact with dynamic and unstructured environments.
Antonia's project focuses on developing new methods for uncertainty-aware mapping for aerial manipulation. Challenges to be addressed during the project include the resource-constrained platform of the aerial robot, the transfer of higher-level information to the operator, and the interaction with the environment through the manipulator.
Riccardo Franceschini (ESR7)
Riccardo received his BSc in Computer Science from University of Trento (UNITN) in 2018 and his MSc in Autonomous Systems from Aalto University and University of Trento (under the European double degree program EIT Digital) in 2020. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Robotics unit in Eurecat Barcelona. His main research interest is in performance assessment and autonomy aware Human Robot Interaction and mission planning for aerial infrastructure Inspections.
Riccardo's project focuses on how to improve interaction to reduce mission operator dependency while increasing the quality of aerial infrastructure inspections. Therefore, the objectives of the project are:
defining and implementing quantitative metrics to identify the capabilities of the robots and the workload of the operator;
exploiting metrics to enable the drone with an intelligent mission planning module;
integrating the information of the metrics into the human-drone communication loop.
Achilleas Seisa (ESR10)
Achilleas is a PhD candidate at Luleå University of Technology, currently working on semi-autonomous remote aerial manipulation. He received his Integrated Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Patras, where he was a member of the Robotics Lab of the Division of Systems and Automatic Control. There, he gained industrial experience in automation and academic experience in robotic manipulation, mobile robots, control systems, and computer vision. His main research interest is in control of aerial manipulation for inspection and maintenance.
His PhD project focuses on augmented reality for enhancing semi-autonomous remote aerial manipulation. The goal is to ensure that only the most relevant information between the human operator and the autonomous system are shared intuitively. Some of the project objectives are to:
handle the seamless integration/fusion of the robotic modelling, path planning, obstacle avoidance, low level flying control and the environmental perception
develop algorithms for autonomous robot to user suggestions
develop methods for user to robot intuitive command
Check out all our ESR projects here.