Project CARO

In English

Research Project

Core Capabilities for Robot Co-workers (CaRo)

TITLE: Core Capabilities for Robot Co-workers

Acronym: CaRo

REFERENCE: PID2020-114819GB-I00

PERIOD: 01/09/2021 - 30/08/2025

PROJECT LEADER 1: Raúl Suárez Feijóo
Email:  raul.suarez@upc.edu Phone: +34-934016548/6654

PROJECT LEADER 2: Jan Rosell Gratacòs
Email:  jan.rosell@upc.edu Phone: +34-934017162/6654

CENTER:Institut de Organització i Control de Sistemes Industrials (IOC)
                Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)

KEYWORDS: robotics, dexterous manipulation, mobile manipulators, human-robot interaction, task and motion planning

Summary:
"Full automation" with "fully autonomous, intelligent and dexterous robots" is commonly presented as the ultimate goal of robotic automation. However, there are examples that show that robots have not yet achieved the intelligence and skills needed to solve some tasks, particularly when uncertainty (from different sources) is significant, or, if the robots can solve the tasks, they are very inefficient. This has led to the concept of robot co-worker, a robot "sufficiently skillful and intelligent" and "sufficiently autonomous" destined to work as a collaborator of the human being, who has the necessary knowledge and capabilities to seek for solutions to solve the tasks in certain situations. The concept of robot co-worker is not new, and it is more and more significant in the current state of robotics, although many different technical requirements are still far away from being solved. A robot co-worker should be prepared to work jointly with the human in work spaces not adapted to it (at least not fully) but rather adapted to the human, and the robot should be able to act in such a way that the efficiency of the work done jointly with the human is greater than that of the work of both working separately. This implies that the robot co-workers must have specific capabilities (regarding intelligence and skills) to be autonomous enough during their collaboration with humans. In this line, the general objective of the project is to advance in the development of core capabilities for dual-arm robot co-workers, developing tools to provide the robots with manipulation capabilities that make them: a) able to work in semi-structured human environments and cope with uncertainty in the knowledge of the state of the environment and in the action outcomes; b) able to successfully execute a sequence of actions despite potential variations in the environment; c) able to fluently interact with other robots and with humans, trying to perform human-like movements to facilitate the interaction, d) able to exploit the dexterity given by two mechanical hands. Following this general objective, the project aims to contribute according to the following specific objectives: a) Development of tools for perception and reasoning, from the point of view of the information processing to understand the environment and the current situation of the task to be solved; b) Development of adaptive and dynamic methods for planning tasks and movements taking into account the uncertainty in the state of the environment, generating plans that can be adapted flexibly and quickly to the real situation of the environment to avoid replanning; c) Development of robust strategies for bi-manual grasping and manipulation, with particular emphasis on in-two-hand manipulation; and, d) Exploit the current fast state-of-the-art communication technologies, like 5G, in the communications between an operator and a robot, between robots, or between a robot and a distributed computer system. The proposed solutions will be validated in a real experimental setup specifically prepared in the project, including a dual-arm robot with dexterous capabilities that will be used as robot co-worker. Finally, as in all the developments of the group, the problems will be addressed looking for general solutions valid for industrial as well as for service robotics.

PUBLICATIONS

PhD Student position associated to the project, follow the link for directions (in Spanish) OPEN UNTIL 11/11/2021.