Embodied Motion Intelligence for Cognitive, Autonomous Robots

Credit: EMICAB

Future robotic systems will have to autonomously operate in unpredictable environments and to smoothly interact with humans. This requires the control of complex bodies with many degrees of freedom based on input from multimodal sensory systems.
The EU-project EMICAB takes a holistic approach to the engineering of artificial cognitive systems. The goal is to integrate smart body mechanics in intelligent planning and control of motor behaviour. To achieve this goal the project accounts equally for problems in neuroscience (e.g., multi-sensory integration, internal body models, intelligent action planning) and technology (smart body mechanics, distributed embodied sensors and brain-like controllers).

The €2 Million EMICAB project is formed by the Biomechatronics lab and the Neuroethology lab of Bielefeld University (coordinator), a Systems Engineering lab at the University of Catania, Italy, a Sensor Technology lab at the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg, and a Neurogenetics lab at the University of Mainz, Germany.

First demonstration of SARTRE vehicle platooning

Vehicle platooning, where a convoy of vehicles follows a professional driver in a lead vehicle by adjusting its movements to the distance, speed, and the direction of the car in front, has advanced in great strides. Following much work in simulation, researchers of the European project Safe Road Trains for the Environment or SARTRE have now achieved a key milestone by performing a real-world demonstration of an autonomous car following a human-driven test vehicle in highway conditions. Have a look at the SARTRE video below.

€ 1,2 Million for Danish-German Robot Project

Handling and packing of natural objects from agriculture and food industry is still mainly a manual process. This because no robot currently available is able to handle the degree of flexibility found in these products.
In Southern Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, there is a rather large food industry that could become endangered if production costs rise. Here, it would be advantageous to upgrade production with intelligent robotic assembly, which at the same time will upgrade the qualifications and required skills of the workers.

The Danish-German cross-boarder robotics project IFRO (Intelligent Robots for handling of Flexible Objects) is aims at bundling expertise within computer vision and robotics across the Danish-German border and supplying a competence center that links to industry as well as research and educational centers in the regions. The € 1,2 Million project is sponsored by the INTERREG 4A programme Syddanmark-Schleswig-K.E.R.N and The European Union’s "The European Regional Development Fund" with € 0,8 million.

€ 3 Million for European Care Robot

A 10 partner consortium coordinated by the Manufacturing Engineering Centre (MEC), Cardiff University, UK will start a R&D project to develop a remotely-controlled, semi-autonomous robotic solutions in domestic environments to support elderly people. In particular, the project will demonstrate an innovative, practical and efficient system called “SRS robot” for personalised home care.

The care robot wil be designed to act as a "shadow" of its controller. For example, elderly parents can have a robot as a shadow of their children or carers. In this case, adult children or carers can help them remotely and physically with tasks such as getting up or going to bed, doing the laundry and setting up ICT equipment etc. as if the children or carers were resident in the house.

This objective will be realised by the following SRS innovations:

A new intent-based remote control mechanism to enable the robots to be tele-operated over a real-world communication network robustly.

An adaptive autonomy mechanism to enable a highly efficient task execution for remotely controlled service robots.

A new robotic self-learning mechanism to enable the robots to learn from their experience.

A safety-oriented framework derived through extensive usability and user acceptance studies that enable service robots to be effectively deployed into home care applications.

The prototypes created in this project will be tested at the “S.Maria Nascente” Centre in Milano and the IZA Care Center in San Sebastián. The final solution will be further developed by Hewlett-Packard and other industrial partners of the consortium for a worldwide market with significant potential and volume.

The € 3 Million research project is supported by EC funding from the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project comprises partners from Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK.

Robot@CWE Project finished

On the 11th of December the final review meeting of the EU-funded FP6 project ROBOT@CWE: Advanced robotic systems in collaborative working environments (Contract No 34002) took place in Paris.

The prime objective of this project was to establish a concept for, and develop prototypes of, a collaborative working environment, conceived such as to include robots and, by so doing, to improve productivity and safety. In the ROBOT@CWE project a robot is seen as a working agent that can simply be "plugged" in a collaborative working environment (CWE) related to a given application context. As the robot connects a given CWE (similarly to any working agent), it inquires the tasks that have been assigned to it by a supervisor or another human/robot working agent. During the review meeting two live demonstrators with the HRP-2 and the HOAP-3 humanoid robot were presented as a concrete proof of a successful integration of the knowledge and the software components that have been developed all along the three years of the project. The project emphasized on the challenging issues in robotics, e.g. physical collocated collaboration, remote teleoperation, collaboration where the robot is "sandwiched" between two users, and learning techniques for skill transfer.