The authors review the most important past and ongoing research projects in macro-robotics, micro-robotics and bio-robotics, three general areas of robotics which have the potential to provide significant improvements to the state of the art of medical technology. A brief analysis of the economic potentialities of robotics in medicine is also provided.

In the underwater domain, guaranteeing accurate navigation for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a complex but fundamental task to be achieved. As a matter of fact, only by ensuring a correct AUV localization, it is possible to accomplish surveillance, monitoring, and inspection missions. Most of the navigation filters for AUVs are based on Bayesian estimators, such as the Kalman filter, the extended Kalman filter (EKF), or the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), and employ different instruments, including the Doppler velocity log to perform the localization task. Recently, the use of payload sensors, such as cameras or forward-looking SONARs, in navigation-aiding has arisen as an interesting research field in the attempt to reduce the localization error drift. Such sensors, if used simultaneously, can provide multiple observations, which can be combined in a Kalman filtering framework to increase navigation robustness against noise sources. Navigation techniques that employ multiple devices can provide a high improvement of the estimation quality, but they can also cause an increase in terms of computational load. Consequently, strategies that can represent a tradeoff between these two conflicting goals have to be investigated. In this contribution, two different frameworks have been implemented and compared: on the one hand, a centralized iterative UKF-based navigation approach and, on the other hand, a sensor fusion framework with parallel local UKFs. The sequential (or iterated) UKF, where the correction step is iteratively performed for each available measurement, belongs to the first class of filters. The federated and the consensus-based decentralized UKFs can be categorized as the second class and they differ in the employed fusion strategy. Experimental navigation data obtained during sea trials performed at Vulcano Island, Messina, Italy has been used for offline validation. The results analysis focuses on both the navigation quality and the filter robustness against the reduction of the available measurements.

European trains are equipped with a pneumatic braking system that has to respect severe specifications concerning both performances and safety. The pneumatic braking system is composed of hundreds of different pneumatic components that reproduce the prescribed response by a complex logic of pneumatic and mechanical elements. In this paper a tool for a complete simulation of the pneumatic braking system is described, it was developed using the Matlab-Simulink numerical environment. The tool is composed of three different libraries of pneumatic components. The first includes the elementary components such as pipes, orifices, valves and the reservoir. By assembling elementary components, an advanced user can build a customized version of general pneumatic components or plants. Complex components of general use for railway pneumatic brake such as brake cylinders, distributors, pressure transformers and brake valves are available in a second library that can be used to assemble a customized braking plant for a vehicle. The last library is composed of macro-pneumatic subsystems that reproduce the braking system of a typical railway vehicle. Many common plant layouts are reproduced in this library (freight car, passenger coaches, locomotives, etc.). The pneumatic brake system of a train can be simulated by assembling in a single Matlab-Simulink model the elements of the library. In this paper the main features of this numerical tool and the test procedures developed to validate the software are described. Experimental data have been kindly supplied by Trenitalia SPA and they are referred to several test campaigns managed by Italian railway in order to verify and release existing components of the pneumatic brake.

ARchaeological RObot systems for the World's Seas (ARROWS) EU Project proposes to adapt and develop low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technologies to significantly reduce the cost of archaeological operations, covering the full extent of archaeological campaign. ARROWS methodology is to identify the archaeologists requirements in all phases of the campaign and to propose related technological solutions. Starting from the necessities identified by archaeological project partners in collaboration with the Archaeology Advisory Group, a board composed of European archaeologists from outside ARROWS, the aim is the development of a heterogeneous team of cooperating AUVs capable of comply with a complete archaeological autonomous mission. Three new different AUVs have been designed in the framework of the project according to the archaeologists' indications: MARTA, characterized by a strong hardware modularity for ease of payload and propulsion systems configuration change; U-C AT, a turtle inspired bio-mimetic robot devoted to shipwreck penetration and A-Size AUV, a vehicle of small dimensions and weight easily deployable even by a single person. These three vehicles will cooperate within the project with AUVs already owned by ARROWS partners exploiting a distributed high-level control software based on the World Model Service (WMS), a storage system for the environment knowledge, updated in real-time through online payload data process, in the form of an ontology. The project includes also the development of a cleaning tool for well-known artifacts maintenance operations. The paper presents the current stage of the project that will lead to overall system final demonstrations, during Summer 2015, in two different scenarios, Sicily (Italy) and Baltic Sea (Estonia)