Cognitive Systems & Robotics Laboratory

Advancing the physical intelligence and performance of roBOTs towards human-like bi-manual objects MANipulation ⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀

Advancing the physical intelligence and performance of roBOTs towards human-like bi-manual objects MANipulation

The MANiBOT project aims at endorsing bi-manual mobile robots with the capability to perform a wide variety of manipulation tasks with highly diverse objects of various sizes, weights, shapes, materials and rigidities in a human-like manner and performance in diverse challenging environments. Simple grasping, pick-and-place operations, bimanual and non-prehensile manipulations with adaptive responses to the objects’ properties and to changing, human-populated environments with various constraints will be handled due the project’s novel perception, control and cognition methods along with the use of cognitive mechatronics. In particular, new environment understanding and object/pose recognition methods based on an adaptive, context-aware fusion of vision, proximity and tactile sensing will allow fast, safe and efficient handling of diverse objects, without precise model, including deformable ones, in diverse environments. A novel suite of manipulation primitives along with bimanual manipulation and closely coupled with the perception modules will allow the transfer of these objects even upon significant spatial constraints while innovative cognitive mechatronics will fuse advanced tactile and proximity sensors with the bi-manual mobile manipulator to optimize the robot’s energy efficiency and autonomy. All the advanced sensing and actuation methods will be orchestrated by a new approach for cognitive functions based on multi-level adaptive cycles that will allow the robot to learn, compose and seamlessly adapt robot behavior to enable complex manipulations. MANiBOT will implement its methods with a focus on transportation and retail sectors, addressing the tasks of baggage handling at airports and supermarket shelves’ restocking, and will be evaluated in three different pilot sites (two supermarkets and one airport) in two EU countries (Greece, Germany). MANiBOT’s goal is to pave the way towards a new market of cobots that can manipulate objects in ways similar to humans, revolutionizing as such the manipulation procedures and robots’ adoption in a wide range of application areas such as logistics, transport, agri-food, and manufacture, while giving added value to the Digital Supply Chain.