Measurement uncertainty represent the doubt and the extent of the doubt for any empirical data collection gathered from real applications. The main consequence of the presence of the unavoidable measurement uncertainties is largely not explicitly considered in robotic applications, despite the possibly large negative impact they may have. This phenomenon is exacerbated when nonlinear dynamics come into play. In this talk, we will analyse the effect of measurement uncertainties for mobile robots applications, starting the analysis from the structural properties of the systems, such as observability and constructibility, which are preconditions to build an effective robotic solution. We will mainly focus on the localisation problem, with optimal landmarks placement algorithms, and we will show how uncertainties can be dominated by a wise analysis of their effects for the specific problem at hand. We will also show that, the uncertainty analysis can guide the design of planning algorithms. We finally introduce the distributed aspects of such problems and what are the robotics team applications that can be solved. In the talk, we will mainly focus on ranging-based solutions (e.g., Ultra-Wide Band systems), which are gaining popularity due to their low cost, low power and good accuracy, but we also considered other radio frequency solutions, such as RFID or radars, that turns out to be viable solutions in the robotics context.
Daniele Fontanelli (M’09, SM'19) received the M.S. degree in Information Engineering in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in Automation, Robotics and Bioengineering in 2006, both from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy. He was a Visiting Scientist with the Vision Lab of the University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, US, from 2006 to 2007. From 2007 to 2008, he has been an Associate Researcher with the Interdepartmental Research Center ``E. Piaggio'', University of Pisa. From 2008 to 2013 he joined as an Associate Researcher the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science and from 2014 the Department of Industrial Engineering, both at the University of Trento, Trento, Italy, where he is now a Full Professor in the field of Measurement and Robotics. He has authored and co-authored more than 200 scientific papers in peer-reviewed top journals and conference proceedings. He is currently a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement and an Associate Editor for the IET Science, Measurement & Technology Journal and for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He has also served in the technical program committee of numerous conferences in the area of measurements and robotics, and he is a member of TC17 - Measurement in Robotics. He has been served as an Associate Editor in Chief from 2021 to 2023 and as an Associate Editor from 2019 to 2021 for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation. He is the co-founder of Polytec Intralogistics Srl (aka Dolomiti Robotics - https://dolomitirobotics.it/). He is the PI of the EU project MAGICIAN - iMmersive leArninG for ImperfeCtion detectIon and repAir through human-robot interactioN - and he was the PI of the EIT-Digital international Master on “Autonomous Systems” from 2017 to 2023. His research interests include localisation algorithms, mobile robots, service robotics, human-robot interaction and estimation, distributed and real-time estimation and control, synchrophasor estimation, and resource aware control.
