Perception-aware Path Planning

In this paper, we give a double twist to the problem of planning under uncertainty. State-of-the-art planners seek to minimize the localization uncertainty by only considering the geometric structure of the scene. In this paper, we argue that motion planning for vision-controlled robots should be perception aware in that the robot should also favor texture-rich areas to minimize the localization uncertainty during a goal-reaching task. Thus, we describe how to optimally incorporate the photometric information (i.e., texture) of the scene, in addition to the the geometric one, to compute the uncertainty of vision-based localization during path planning. To avoid the caveats of feature-based localization systems (i.e., dependence on feature type and user-defined thresholds), we use dense, direct methods. This allows us to compute the localization uncertainty directly from the intensity values of every pixel in the image. We also describe how to compute trajectories online, considering also scenarios with no prior knowledge about the map. The proposed framework is general and can easily be adapted to different robotic platforms and scenarios. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments using a vision-controlled micro aerial vehicle.Comment: 16 pages, 20 figures, revised version. Conditionally accepted for IEEE Transactions on Robotic

The Grotesque between Il Trovatore and La Traviata

The grotesque represents in a certain way the leading form of ugly since the latter became a too general concept to serve as an effective explicatory principle. Starting from Rosenkrantz’s conception of the grotesque, with a view to Kosik’s thesis of the decline of the tragic in favor of the grotesque during the nineteenth century, this article explores the presence and the modes of this aesthetic category in some of Verdi’s masterpieces: Il Trovatore and La Traviata

“Poesia” senza poesia: Franz Kafka, Maria Callas

The poetic world includes both poetry to be intended as a specific literary genre and a wider poeticity diffused in the artistic sphere and elsewhere. In this contribution I will consider from my own point of view two highly significant cases of the artistic world: Franz Kafka and Maria Callas. The great attraction that Kafka has exerted on me since the last years of high school has been triggered by passages mentioned by Remo Cantoni in his Introductions to The Castle, to the Diaries, to the Letters to Milena ecc. In the same years I used to attend Teatro alla Scala where Maria Callas performed. These events are apparently so distant from each other, but they are very close in my experience because of the intense poeticity that innervates both

Borgna: psichiatria fenomenologica e poesie

Questo saggio intende indagare il rapporto tra psichiatria fenomenologica e poesia nelle opere di Eugenio Borgna Le passioni fragili e La nostalgia ferita. Per lui il mondo estetico-artistico ha un valore cognitivo: la letteratura non è materia tanto della critica letteraria o di attenzioni filologiche; la letteratura è piuttosto fonte, testimonianza e corroborazione della conoscenza psichiatrica.The essay aims to investigate the connection between phenomenological psychiatry and poetry in the books on “fragile passions” and “nostalgia” of Eugenio Borgna. For him the aesthetic-artistic world has a cognitive value: the literature is not matter of literary criticism or philological attention; literature is rather source, testimony and corroboration of psychiatric knowledge

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