The European Union (EU) has completed a five-year project to develop collaborative humanoid robots to assist workers in industrial settings. Participants have announced advances in “learning artificial intelligence, natural language processing and robotics.” done.
The Second Hands project originated from the European Union’s € 80 billion Horizon 2020 research program. It started in 2015 with the goal of developing “an arm” for factory and warehouse workers. The goal is to develop a robotic assistant who will act as a trainee-like assistant to handle less skilled tasks and “voluntarily” help technicians lift and carry objects.
The project includes the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Sapienza University of Rome, the University College London (UCL) and Okado, the Kingdom’s largest online food vendor.
United. It is hosted by researchers and computer scientists from many organizations, including Okado Technology, the technical department at University College London.
The climax of the program is a robot named ARMAR-6, which was developed by German KIT to advance the investigation of human-computer interaction in a structured surveillance environment.
Cooperation with robots
In recent years, ARMAR-6 has been tested at Ocado’s British Automation Customer Compliance Center to maintain its conveyor system.
Basically this is an effort to use robots to help repair other robots. The point is that when the maintenance technician holds the tool in his hand and sits on the ladder, and his arm reaches down to lower the tool, the robot can see the movement and receive the tool.
Additionally, ARMAR-6 is designed to learn and adapt to real-world situations, such as grasping it when someone wants to move it from one location to another.
ARM-6
Working image Copyright: SecondHands H2020 Consortium (provided by Ocado Technology)
The ARMAR-6 is equipped with a telescopic torso and rotating arms, hands, and grippable fingers with various sensors and cameras.
What’s more, it can interact with the environment using only visual data, detect the position of a human, and estimate the posture using only real-time images.
ARM-6
Images that use real-time visual data to estimate poses Copyright: H2020 SecondHands Consortium (provided by Ocado Technology)
Another important theme of the project is to show how ARMAR-6 avoids collisions in fast-moving industrial environments, where obstacles, including people, mix with stationary and moving objects.
ARM-6
Images that avoid moving and stationary objects (such as people) Copyright: H2020 SecondHands Consortium (provided by Ocado Technology)
Other notable developments in the project include the development of a speech interface based entirely on neural models, such as full neural speech synthesis and full neural speech recognition.
Regarding these advances, KIT’s Dr. Sebastian Stüker stated that “collaborative robots” will be widely accepted by humans, which will make human-robot interaction more natural.
Application to society
The main goal of SecondHands is to use Ocado as a foothold to promote the transition of humanoid assistants from a research environment to an industrial environment. Now that the project has been officially completed, plans are being made to apply the research results to use cases in sectors such as driverless cars and the oil and gas industry.
Currently, Ocado has no plans to implement ARMAR-6 in logistics centers.
This shows that it is not completely ready to run in a commercial environment. However, several private ARMAR-6 projects are underway in other industries, and significant progress can be made in using humanoid assistants in the real world.
Graham Deacon, a robotics researcher at Ocado Technology, said: “The results of this project clearly show how robots can enhance the benefits of the human experience. We look to the future and will continue to advance and apply these advancements in the real world. I am “.
The project also emphasized the need for cooperation between industry and the university. If you hit the first hurdle in the real world, there is no point developing an AI-equipped robot in an experimental setting.
In addition, it should be noted that as the new coronavirus crisis forces all countries to take measures against social distancing, the project will end with the introduction of automation technology.
In the future, the use of technologies that support ARMAR-6 will spread to other settings and may be “very useful for pollution reduction and long-term care” (Deacon).
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