Giovanni Toffetti

A showcase of my recent professional work

Follow me on GitHub

Cloud Robotics Initiative @ ICCLab

I currently lead the Cloud Robotics Initiative at the Distributed Systems Group @ InIT (a.k.a. ICCLab). Our mission is to advance the synergy between cloud computing, robotics, and AI through research, education, and community engagement.

Overview

At ICCLab, we focus on:

  • Research: Pioneering robotics, AI, and cloud integration through Innosuisse and EU Horizon Europe projects.
  • Education: Teaching robotics, guiding BSc/MSc theses, and hosting impactful workshops.
  • Dissemination: Sharing knowledge at meetups, conferences, and topic groups.

Robotic Research Highlights

For a complete list of my publications please refer to my Google Scholar page

ICRA’24

A Method for Multi-Robot Asynchronous Trajectory Execution in MoveIt2 P Stoop, T Ratnayake, G Toffetti 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

IROS’23 - “Task and Motion Planning: from Theory to Practice” Workshop

https://dyalab.mines.edu/2023/iros-workshop/

A Method for Multi-Robot Asynchronous Trajectory Execution in MoveIt2 P Stoop, T Ratnayake, G Toffetti IROS 2023 Workshop on Task and Motion Planning: from Theory to Practice

IROS’22 - “Cloud and Fog Robotics In The Age of Deep Learning” Workshop

https://sites.google.com/view/iros22-cloud-robotics/

Cloud Native Robotic Applications with GPU Sharing on Kubernetes G Toffetti, L Militano, S Murphy, R Maurer, M Straub IROS 2022 Workshop “Cloud and Fog Robotics In The Age of Deep Learning”

ICRA’21 - “Task-Informed Grasping: Agri-Food manipulation” (TIG-III) Workshop

Teat Pose Estimation via RGBD Segmentation for Automated Milking N. Borla, F. Kuster, J. Langenegger, J. Ribera, M. Honegger, G. Toffetti “Task-Informed Grasping: Agri-Food manipulation” (TIG-III) Workshop at ICRA 2021

Projects / Robotic Applications

NEPHELE Project (2022-2025) - Ongoing

A lightweight software stack for managing IoT, edge, and cloud computing with use cases like:

  • Search and Rescue (SAR): Coordinating emergency responses with a system-of-systems approach.

Green Solar Roof Plant-Cutting Robot (2023-2025) - Ongoing

Joint work with the ZHAW Institute of Mechatronic Systems (IMS)

  • Main Contributions:
    • 3D SLAM and navigation using custom Nav2 behavior trees
    • Coverage Planning with Fields2Cover
    • AI-based roof life detection
    • Cloud-based Fleet Management and teleoperation

Milking Robot (2019-2021) - Innosuisse Collaboration with ZHAW IMS

Joint work with the ZHAW Institute of Mechatronic Systems (IMS)

  • Combines AI, computer vision, and robotics.
  • Main Contribution:
    • Teat pose estimation using RGBD segmentation.

alt text

alt text

alt text alt text

ECRP with Rapyuta Robotics (2016-2019)

FIWARE & FIROS

  • We started working on robotics while working with FIWARE and FIROS to bridge robotics with cloud ecosystems.
  • Learn more about FIROS on ROS.org.

BSc and MSc Theses

Recent Examples…

Semantic Mapping with MIT Hydra

Tomato Picking with Mobile Manipulator and Behavior Tree

Search and Rescue with Drones

Fleet Management

Coordinating multi-robot systems with Open-RMF.

Education: Robotic Applications Programming (RAP-EN) @ ZHAW

A comprehensive robotics course covering:

  • Core Topics:
    • ROS 1/2 software development.
    • URDF, Xacro, pose in 3D
    • ROS Control
    • SLAM, motion planning, and perception
    • Distributed Robotic Applications
  • Practical Labs:
    • Challenges in simulation and real-world robots.
  • Hardware we Use
Robot  
SUMMIT-XL Steel equipped with: Universal Robots UR5 arm; Schunk and Robotiq grippers; Intel Realsense D435 camera and front/back LIDARs.
TurtleBot 2 (2x): LIDAR, Jetson, Astra Depth Camera, and auto-docking.
TurtleBot 3 (6x)
Niryo One (3x)

Community Engagement

Contact Us

For more details, visit our official website: DSY @ InIT / ZHAW.