Michele Colledanchise

Background

About Michele Colledanchise

I am a Robot Behavior Developer, responsible for integrating different robot's skills to make robots behave. I was a Researcher at the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIS) with the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), working in Dr. Lorenzo Natale‘s group. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science, specializing in Robotics, from KTH, Sweden. My advisor was Prof. Petter Ögren. In January-June 2016 I was a visiting scholar at Control and Dynamical System of Caltech, supervised by Prof. Richard Murray. My principal interests lie in Control Architectures for Safe and Robust systems and Automated Planning, with direct applications on robotics platforms. My research aims to address the question: ’How can the robot deliberation in dynamic and unpredictable environments benefit from the task representation language?’. The question arises from the fact that manual design and automated planning techniques represent the most used approaches in robot autonomy and they both rely on the chosen task representation language. My past research has helped to answer this question by investigating alternative task representation languages. In this setting, I identified Behavior Trees, widely adopted in the video game industry, as an innovatory task representation language for robot deliberation and I analyzed their main advantages. The main advantages of BTs lie in their modular structure and reactive execution that enable the designer to shape complex robotics behavior by aggregating simpler ones