Other Projects | Massimiliano Iaschi

The main project I worked on when I was part of the PoWeR lab was under the supervision of Amro Alshareef during Spring 2023. With his help, I designed and implemented a PID control system in Simulink for Bump’Em, an open-source bump-emulation platform developed at Stanford University, that we recreated in our lab at Georgia Tech to study human balance and gait.

Video shows me testing the bump'em platform that me and Amro implemented in the PoWeR lab, with increasing force perturbation amplitudes.

Tethys Robotics is a spin-off project at ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab, led by Prof. Roland Siegwart, dedicated to developing autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for exploration, environmental monitoring, and search-and-rescue missions. During my Summer 2023 internship, I contributed to multiple aspects of the project, while simultaneously taking two Georgia Tech courses and an ETH course in ROS for master’s students. Specifically, I designed Python-based algorithms for real-time monitoring of the AUV’s pose and surrounding water current, aiding robust navigation and motion planning. Additionally, I conducted research on novel mechanical and soft robotic components for integration into next-generation AUVs.

My key mechanical design projects included:

Autonomously developing a retractable leg with an automatic locking mechanism, enhancing on-land handling and underwater deployment
Exploring the integration of a soft robotic tail, inspired by collaborative research between Tethys and Prof. Robert Katzschmann

Video on the top left shows Tethys ONE, the first robot launched to the market by Tethys. Top right picture instead shows me testing the robot in a lake near Zurich city centre with Andrej, the mapping lead of Tethys. Video on the bottom shows the bio-inspired robot designed to mimic real fish locomotion, developed by Prof. Robert Katzschmann and Prof. Daniel Rus, using hydraulic actuation and a soft elastomer body. While I did not prototype the tail while at ETH, I further explored soft robotics and pneumatic actuation the following semester at Georgia Tech.

The Flexybot project is the result of a collaboration between my mentor Baxi Chong and former MIT PhD student Di Luo, aimed at introducing a novel contact planning framework for multi-legged robots by mapping the planning problem to spin models (Potts and Ising). This enables the discovery of globally optimal gait sequences for complex locomotion. This was my first project in the lab, and my contributions included:

Mechanical design and prototyping of the hexapod
Basic control design, robot testing, and high-level analysis

Despite the introductory role, it helped me grasp key concepts in multi-legged locomotion such as temporal and spatial frequencies, and body/leg amplitudes.

Flexybot, a simple hexapod robot. A paper based on our Fall 2023 experiments is planned for submission in the coming months, where I will contribute to the physics modeling.

I spent my first summer at Georgia Tech at Domenico Prattichizzo’s lab at Siena University. The project focused on validating the hypothesis that thermal modulation at the fingertip can create the illusion of a broader contact surface, due to the temperature dependence of human skin’s viscoelastic and moisture properties.

My contributions included:

Designing and assembling a custom hardware setup for generating thermal illusions
Developing a closed-loop temperature control system in LabVIEW to enable real-time modulation and targeted haptic perception

A figure showing the experimental setup used in a subsequent paper from the lab, using hardware and control systems similar to those I developed in Summer 2022.