Publications by Roberto Vezzani

The complete workflow of the RI-PIENO framework is presented, a system for refueling itinerary optimization that extends the original PIENO design. While prior work introduced the conceptual modules of RI-PIENO, their operational pipeline was not described in detail. This study makes the workflow explicit, covering the end-to-end process from CAN Bus data acquisition and stop detection to the construction of daily trip graphs, refueling optimization, and mileage prediction. By clarifying the sequence of operations, the contribution provides a reproducible and extensible foundation for future research and development.

Technologies to enable safe and effective collaboration and coexistence between humans and robots have gained significant importance in the last few years. A critical component useful for realizing this collaborative paradigm is the understanding of human and robot 3D poses using non-invasive systems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel vision-based system leveraging depth data to accurately establish the 3D locations of skeleton joints. Specifically, we introduce the concept of Pose Nowcasting, denoting the capability of the proposed system to enhance its current pose estimation accuracy by jointly learning to forecast future poses. The experimental evaluation is conducted on two different datasets, providing accurate and real-time performance and confirming the validity of the proposed method on both the robotic and human scenarios.

Multi-person pose estimation is the task of detecting and regressing the keypoint coordinates of multiple people in a single image. Significant progress has been achieved in recent years, especially with the introduction of transformer-based end-to-end methods. In this paper, we present DualPose, a novel framework that enhances multi-person pose estimation by leveraging a dual-block transformer decoding architecture. Class prediction and keypoint estimation are split into parallel blocks so each sub-task can be separately improved and the risk of interference is reduced. This architecture improves the precision of keypoint localization and the model's capacity to accurately classify individuals. To improve model performance, the Keypoint-Block uses parallel processing of self-attentions, providing a novel strategy that improves keypoint localization accuracy and precision. Additionally, DualPose incorporates a contrastive denoising (CDN) mechanism, leveraging positive and negative samples to stabilize training and improve robustness. Thanks to CDN, a variety of training samples are created by introducing controlled noise into the ground truth, improving the model's ability to discern between valid and incorrect keypoints. DualPose achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming recent end-to-end methods, as shown by extensive experiments on the MS COCO and CrowdPose datasets. The code and pretrained models are publicly available.

Humanoid robots are increasingly being integrated into diverse scenarios, such as healthcare facilities, social settings, and workplaces. As the need for intuitive control by non-expert users grows, many studies have explored the use of Artificial Intelligence to enable communication and control. However, these approaches are often tailored to specific robots due to the absence of standardized conventions and notation. This study addresses the challenges posed by these inconsistencies and investigates their impact on the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate accurate 3D robot poses, even when detailed robot specifications are provided as input.

In this study, we demonstrate the capabilities of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) in teaching social robots to perform specific actions within a 3D environment. Specifically, we introduce the use of LLMs to generate sequences of 3D joint angles - in both zero-shot and one-shot prompting - that a humanoid robot must follow to perform a given action. This work is driven by the growing demand for intuitive interactions with social robots: indeed, LLMs could empower non-expert users to operate and benefit from robotic systems effectively. Additionally, this method leverages the possibility to generate synthetic data without effort, enabling privacy-focused use cases. To evaluate the output quality of seven different LLMs, we conducted a blind user study to compare the pose sequences. Participants were shown videos of the well-known NAO robot performing the generated actions and were asked to identify the intended action and choose the best match with the original instruction from a collection of candidates created by different LLMs. The results highlight that the majority of LLMs are indeed capable of planning correct and complete recognizable actions, showing a novel perspective of how AI can be applied to social robotics.