Risk-based Cybersecurity Assessment for Vehicle to Everything (V2X) Communications: A Multi-Tier Experimental Framework

Scaling Model Predictive Control for High-Dimensional Robotic Systems

Legged robots are increasingly recognized for their potential to revolutionize various sectors by performing tasks that are challenging and hazardous for humans. Unlocking new behaviors is pivotal not only for disaster response but also to expand their role in industries such as logistics and manufacturing. Controlling such robotic systems is a challenging task. The robot should not only be able to define a strategy autonomously, but also to replan it when necessary. Model Predictive C...

Intuitive, Information-Theoretic, and LLM-Interactive Robot Programming from Video Demonstrations

In recent decades, robotic platforms have become increasingly relevant across industrial, healthcare, and domestic domains. However, the complexity of robot programming still limits their accessibility and widespread adoption. To overcome this barrier, research has focused on developing intuitive programming methods that simplify robot instruction for non-experts. Among these, programming by demonstration enables robots to acquire skills directly from human performances, allowing domain exper...

Registration Methods for Surgical Augmented Reality

Objective. Surgical safety remains a major challenge: even with the advent of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and robotic systems, surgeons still rely heavily on their own experience to interpret preoperative images and mentally translate them into the operative field. In many procedures, particularly in laparoscopy, locating critical structures (e.g. vessels, tumours) is difficult, especially in altered anatomy, leading to longer operative times, increased cognitive load, and a higher risk ...

New architectures for solid-state quantum batteries: from theory to quantum simulation

Batteries are fundamental components of nowadays technologies and play a crucial role in our daily lives. Varying greatly in size and capacity, they are devices capable of storing energy, supplied from an external system, and releasing it in a controlled manner to a user system. Despite the impressive technological improvements over the past two centuries, the batteries we currently use still rely on the electrochemical principles exploited by A. Volta at the end of the 18th century. However,...

Optochemical retinal prosthesis for vision restoration

Current neural prostheses predominantly rely on electrical stimulation, which does not faithfully replicate the physiological mechanisms of synaptic transmission. Localized chemical delivery represents a more biomimetic strategy, yet previous approaches have been hindered by low spatial resolution, limited retention, and poor material biocompatibility and stability. This thesis investigates a planar solid-state platform for nanoscale, multisite neurotransmitter release, based on a nanopattern...

Distributed control strategies for cooperative and collaborative object transportation via Multi-Robot systems

This research deals with the development of distributed control strategies for object transportation within multi-robot frameworks, encompassing both fully autonomous cooperative manipulators and collaborative human-robot interaction. The first part of the work investigates the cooperative transportation problem, where a team of robots is tasked with manipulating a shared load relying exclusively on local peer-to-peer communication. To address the scalability and robustness limitations inh...

Synapsin isoforms differentially modulate presynaptic voltage-gated Ca2+ channels in excitatory and inhibitory neurons

Synapsins are a family of phosphoproteins essential for controlling neurotransmitter release by clustering synaptic vesicles and tethering them to the actin cytoskeleton, thereby supporting synaptic plasticity. Beyond these roles, Synapsins are crucial for maintaining the balance between excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission. Mutations in Synapsin genes have been associated with epilepsy and autism spectrum disorder. Furthermore, silencing Synapsin in invertebrates causes an increas...

Real-Time Monocular Scene Analysis for UAV in Outdoor Environments

Understanding the geometric and semantic properties of the scene is crucial in autonomous navigation and particularly challenging in the case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Such information may be obtained by estimating depth and semantic segmentation maps of the surrounding environment, and for practicality, the procedure must be performed as fast as possible. In this thesis, we leverage monocular cameras on aerial robots to predict depth and semantic maps in low-altitude unstructured env...