Research

DustBot Research Archive

The DustBot consortium produced more than 40 peer-reviewed publications between 2007 and 2010. These papers spanned robotics, wireless communications, environmental sensing, human-robot interaction, and urban planning. This section collects summaries of the most significant contributions.

Navigation and Localisation

Outdoor navigation in unstructured urban environments was one of DustBot’s core technical challenges. The project contributed novel approaches to obstacle avoidance and path planning in pedestrian zones, combining differential GPS with laser rangefinder data for centimetre-level accuracy.

Communications Infrastructure

The IEEE Globecom 2008 paper by Fantacci, Tacconi, and colleagues addressed the ad-hoc wireless networking required to coordinate a fleet of autonomous service robots in a town with limited infrastructure.

Environmental Monitoring

DustClean’s air quality sensors generated some of the earliest mobile gas distribution maps for European towns. Work by Lilienthal and colleagues on gas distribution mapping using mobile robots became influential in environmental monitoring research.

Human-Robot Interaction

Field trials in Peccioli, Bilbao, and Osaka provided rare data on how non-expert users interact with autonomous robots in public spaces. The consortium’s HRI studies examined call-based service requests, pedestrian behaviour around the robots, and public acceptance of autonomous systems.

Key Researchers

The project’s published output was shaped by several groups: Barbara Mazzolai and Virgilio Mattoli at the Center for Micro-BioRobotics (SSSA Pisa), Achim Lilienthal at Örebro University, Romano Fantacci and Dania Tacconi at the University of Florence, and Paolo Dario, the project’s principal investigator.