Publications by Stefano Mintchev

Dual Stiffness Tensegrity Platform for Resilient Robotics

Dario Floreano, Yi Sun, Stefano Mintchev, Davide Zappetti

Collision resilience is an important feature of robots deployed in unstructured and partially unpredictable environments. Herein, a novel dual stiffness (DS) tensegrity platform to integrate collision resilience into a robot body is proposed. The proposed ...

2022

Bioinspired wing and tail morphing extends drone flight capabilities

Dario Floreano, Flavio Noca, Stefano Mintchev, Enrico Ajanic, Mir Alikhan Bin Mohammad Feroskhan

The aerodynamic designs of winged drones are optimized for specific flight regimes. Large lifting surfaces provide maneuverability and agility but result in larger power consumption, and thus lower range, when flying fast compared with small lifting surfac ...

2020

Ori-Pixel, a Multi-DoFs Origami Pixel for Modular Reconfigurable Surfaces

Jamie Paik, Stefano Mintchev, Marco Salerno

Reconfigurable surfaces using robotic pixels can produce discretize 3D contours, shapes and motion patterns. In existing devices, the rendering resolution and richness of shapes and patterns are limited by the use of linear pixels that only produce single ...

2020

A bioinspired Separated Flow wing provides turbulence resilience and aerodynamic efficiency for miniature drones

Stefano Mintchev, Matteo Di Luca

Small-scale drones have enough sensing and computing power to find use across a growing number of applications. However, flying in the low-Reynolds number regime remains challenging. High sensitivity to atmospheric turbulence compromises vehicle stability ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2020

Teleoperation with a wearable sensor system

Dario Floreano, David Atienza Alonso, Jenifer Cléa Miehlbradt, Alexandre Thierry Cherpillod, Fabio Isidoro Tiberio Dell'Agnola, Silvestro Micera, Martina Coscia, Stefano Mintchev, Fiorenzo Artoni

A method for remotely controlling an operated unmanned object, comprises defining of a set of control movements of an operator; selecting of minimal necessary signals to reliably acquire the operator's control movements; defining of a mapping of the contro ...

2019

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Dario Floreano, Roland Siegwart, Auke Ijspeert, Davide Scaramuzza, Stefano Mintchev, Tomislav Horvat, Kamilo Andres Melo Becerra, Marco Hutter

Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly rel ...

2019

A portable three-degrees-of-freedom force feedback origami robot for human-robot interactions

Alexandre Thierry Cherpillod, Jamie Paik, Stefano Mintchev, Marco Salerno, Simone Scaduto

Haptic interfaces can recreate the experience of touch and are necessary to improve human-robot interactions. However, at present, haptic interfaces are either electromechanical devices eliciting very limited touch sensations or devices that may provide mo ...

SPRINGERNATURE2019

Embodied Flight with a Drone

Dario Floreano, Alexandre Thierry Cherpillod, Stefano Mintchev

Most human-robot interfaces, such as joysticks and keyboards, require training and constant cognitive effort and provide a limited degree of awareness of the robots’ state and its environment. Embodied interactions, that is the bidirectional link between t ...

2019

FOLDAWAY DroneSense, a controller for haptic information encoding for drone pilots

Jamie Paik, Stefano Mintchev, Marco Salerno

Over the last decade, the number of drones has significantly increased. In parallel, researchers have started to investigate new human-drone interaction paradigms for a more natural and immersive piloting experience. The use of haptic feedback to establish ...

2019

Stiffness Perception of Virtual Objects Using FOLDAWAY-Touch

Alexandre Thierry Cherpillod, Jamie Paik, Stefano Mintchev, Marco Salerno, Simone Scaduto

Haptic human interfaces are nowadays becoming more and more diffused also thanks to their combined use with Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality (VR & AR). Although many research platforms explore kinesthetic interaction with virtual objects, the only feedb ...

Springer2019

The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor That Can Squeeze and Fly

Dario Floreano, Davide Scaramuzza, Stefano Mintchev

The recent advances in state estimation, perception, and navigation algorithms have significantly contributed to the ubiquitous use of quadrotors for inspection, mapping, and aerial imaging. To further increase the versatility of quadrotors, recent works i ...

2019

Last-Centimeter Personal Drone Delivery: Field Deployment and User Interaction

Dario Floreano, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, Stefano Mintchev

Drones are rapidly becoming an affordable and often faster solution for parcel delivery than terrestrial vehicles. Existing transportation drones and software infrastructures are mostly designed by logistics companies for trained users and dedicated infras ...

2018

Variable stiffness strip with strain sensing for wearable robotics

Dario Floreano, Carine Rognon, Jun Shintake, Stefano Mintchev, Alice Tonazzini, Vivek Ramachandran

Variable stiffness technologies help to solve the conflicting requirements of strength, comfort, and safety in soft exoskeletons. Here, we propose a modular variable stiffness strip based on layer jamming as a mechanical solution to constrain users' degree ...

2018

Forceful manipulation with micro air vehicles

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Matthew Alfonso Estrada

Micro air vehicles (MAVs) are finding use across an expanding range of applications. However, when interacting with the environment, they are limited by the maximum thrust they can produce. Here, we describe FlyCroTugs, a class of robots that adds to the m ...

2018

FlyJacket: An Upper Body Soft Exoskeleton for Immersive Drone Control

Dario Floreano, David Atienza Alonso, Carine Rognon, Alexandre Thierry Cherpillod, Fabio Isidoro Tiberio Dell'Agnola, Stefano Mintchev

Most human–drone interfaces, such as joysticks and remote controllers, require attention and developed skills during teleoperation. Wearable interfaces could enable a more natural and intuitive control of drones, which would make this technology accessible ...

2018

Data-driven body–machine interface for the accurate control of drones

Dario Floreano, Jenifer Cléa Miehlbradt, Alexandre Thierry Cherpillod, Silvestro Micera, Martina Coscia, Stefano Mintchev, Fiorenzo Artoni

The teleoperation of nonhumanoid robots is often a demanding task, as most current control interfaces rely on mappings between the operator’s and the robot’s actions, which are determined by the design and characteristics of the interface, and may therefor ...

2018

Bioinspired dual-stiffness origami

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Stefano Mintchev

Origami manufacturing has led to considerable advances in the field of foldable structures with innovative applications in robotics, aerospace, and metamaterials. However, existing origami are either load-bearing structures that are prone to tear and fail ...

2018

Jacket for embodied interaction with virtual or distal robotic device

Dario Floreano, David Atienza Alonso, Carine Rognon, Alice Ghislaine Concordel, Fabio Isidoro Tiberio Dell'Agnola, Stefano Mintchev

A system for interacting with a remote object comprising a wearable jacket for a user, two actuators for supporting arms of the user, motors for causing movements to at least one of a torso and the arms of the user, and sensors for measuring at least one o ...

2018

A planar pop-up actuator device with embedded electro-magnetic actuation

Jamie Paik, Amir Firouzeh, Stefano Mintchev, Marco Salerno

A planar actuator device, including a base plate including a first, second, and third pair of planar coils, each pair of planar coils having an inner coil and an outer coil, each pair of planar coils arranged along a first, second, and third linear motion ...

2018

A multi-modal hovering and terrestrial robot with adaptive morphology

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev

Most current drones are designed with a static morphology aimed at exploiting a single locomotion mode. This results in limited versatility and adaptability to multi-domain environments, such as those encountered in rescue missions, agriculture and inspect ...

2018