Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor...
This paper presents the EU EASEL project, which explores the potential impact and relevance of a robot in educational settings. We present the project objectives and the theorectical background on which the project builds, briefly introduce the EASEL...
This work introduces the concept of "personality-friendly" objects. Its goal is to investigate the relationship that can exist between specific interactive products and the users' personalities. Nowadays, it seems that every object being advertised and...
Building a social robot that is able to interact naturally with people is a challenging task that becomes even more ambitious if the robots’ interlocutors are children involved in crowded scenarios like a classroom or a museum. In such scenarios, the...
Robot’s perception is essential for performing highlevel tasks such as understanding, learning, and in general, human-robot interaction (HRI). For this reason, different perception systems have been proposed for different robotic platforms in order to...
Dual-polarization weather radars provide a number of measurements from which considerable meteorological information is obtained. This allows to identify procedures to classify hydrometeors and to estimate rainfall and ice mass. An important challenge...
This paper discusses the hardware implementation and experimental validation of a model-based battery state estimator. The model parameters are identified online using the moving window least squares method. The estimator is implemented in a field...
Area and Power consumption are important design metrics in integrated circuit (IC), in particular in those targeted for wearable devices. Σ-Δ Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) are increasing in popularity in those devices thanks to the low bandwidth of...
We analyze a specific practical problem of bearing-only localization of a stationary target using noisy measurements from three sensors. It is well understood that the performance of any target position estimator is considerably influenced by the...
Two Closed Loop Pulsating Heat Pipes (CLPHPs) are tested on board REXUS 18 sounding rocket in order to obtain data over a relatively long microgravity period (approximately 90 s). The CLPHPs are partially filled with FC-72 and have, respectively,...
U-PHOS Project aims to analyse and characterise the behaviour of a large diameter Pulsating Heat Pipe (PHP) on board REXUS 22 sounding rocket. A PHP is a passive thermal control device consisting of a serpentine capillary tube, evacuated, partially...
Endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysms repair (EVAR) involves the minimally invasive implantation of a stent-graft within the aorta to exclude the aneurysm from the circulation thus preventing its rupture. The feasibility of such operation is highly...
This work proposes a distributed resource allocation (RA) algorithm for packet bit-interleaved coded OFDM transmissions in the uplink of heterogeneous networks (HetNets), characterized by small cells deployed over a macrocell area and sharing the same...
When perfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter, adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) algorithms which maximize the goodput (GP) corresponding to the actual channel realization give rise to the maximum long-term average...
This paper presents a resource allocation (RA) strategy for bit interleaved coded UFMC (BIC-UFMC) communications to be applied in an Internet of Things scenario characterized by short packets. The proposed RA strategy selects the best transmission...
The focus of this work is put on a cognitive network wherein the secondary users (SUs), based on bit-interleaved-coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, share the same band of primary users (PUs). In this context, we develop a...
In this paper, we present a novel resource allocation (RA) algorithm for packet Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC) BIC-based communications, the latter being a novel modulation format possibly envisaged to be applied in 5G wireless systems....
We propose a novel resource allocation (RA) strategy for a cognitive radio packet-oriented bit-interleaved coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (BIC-OFDM) system with decode-and-forward (DF) relays. The aim of the RA is maximizing the...