The finalists for the 2018 KUKA Innovation Award have been chosen! An international jury of experts selected the five best concepts addressing this year’s topic: the “Real-World Interaction Challenge”. The finalist teams now have time until April 2018 to implement their ideas. At next year’s Hannover Messe, the winner will be awarded the 20,000-euro prize.
This year’s competition focuses on robots that can interact outside as well as inside the industrial environment, with emphasis on direct support for humans. The concept and presentation of the applications should be as realistic as possible.
To enable fair comparison of the concepts, KUKA provides each of the final teams with a flexFellow – a mobile robotic unit on which an LBR iiwa (a sensitive lightweight robot for safe human-robot collaboration) is mounted. Beyond this, a 3D vision system from the start-up company Roboception will be available.
The Robot Vision research group from the University of Alberta is working on image guided motion control of robot arms and hands. This team is implementing processes that allow the robot to learn from humans by means of observation, gestures and dialog so that future robot systems will be able to work with humans even in unstructured environments. The goal is for the robot, with this acquired knowledge, to be in a position to grip various everyday objects, workpieces and components and to sort them independently, even if new, unknown objects are included.
The team from the Institute for Computational Design and Construction at the University of Stuttgart combines expertise in algorithmic geometry and the development of robot-based material processing systems. In this project, it aims to provide small and medium-sized companies with access to robot-assisted methods of work. The concept comprises a collaborative robot workbench with an augmented reality interface. The project will demonstrate a woodworking scenario in which a robot assists a human.
The project brings together experts from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in the fields of dynamic human modeling, image processing and robot interaction control. Its objective is to deploy robots to support and guide humans in laborious industrial processes in order to ease the strain on them and prevent injury. When collaborating with a human, the robot monitors the dynamic performance and mental condition of its counterpart.
The employees of Draper, a non-profit R&D organization, the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT and the Agile Robotics Lab in Harvard, aim to show that robots can orient themselves and execute tasks in unstructured environments. For this, the team uses neural networks to determine the positions and interactive dynamics of objects in the environment. The team’s developments are demonstrated by means of a maintenance task that is typically carried out by a human.
Four researchers from the University of Pennsylvania combine their expertise from various robotics disciplines ranging from image processing and manipulation planning to system integration. The team is tackling the challenges facing a robotic system working with containers filled with liquids and used for exact dosing, for example in the pharmaceutical industry. The robot is controlled using sensors on the robot arm and two stereo cameras.
The finalists now realize their ideas with a KUKA robot. They will present their developments to an international audience of specialists at Hannover Messe 2018, a major flagship trade fair. There, the jury will crown the winner of the renowned competition.
