KUKA Innovation Award 2015

KUKA Innovation Award 2015 went to an Italian research team In their “ReTeLINK” project, an exoskeleton communicated with the KUKA LBR iiwa.

The team who won the KUKA Innovation Award 2015 came from the Wearable Robotics Laboratory at the Institutio di BioRobotica of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy. About 15 people worked on the ReTeLINK project – among them postdoctoral students, scientific assistants, PhD students and a junior professor.

From the very beginning, they all played a key role in laboratory and organizational work. Thanks to their ability to adapt, their flexibility and their exceptionally well-structured division of labor, they all acquired valuable technical knowledge. All of them have a strong background in the field of robot development and work autonomously and extremely fast.

Besides the KUKA Innovation Award 2015, numerous research projects – both EU-sponsored projects (CYBERLEGs, WAY, AIDE) and regional projects (AMULOS, IUVO, Earlyrehab) – have added to the winning team’s wealth of experience. While developing the prize-winning ReTeLINK human-robot collaboration solution, the team worked with many different types of wearable robotic devices (upper/lower arm, hand, walking devices).

The winning team from the Biorobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa.

KUKA Innovation Award 2015: other finalists

During the KUKA Innovation Award 2015 competition, many other interesting projects dealing with human-robot collaboration and the LBR iiwa were also presented. Besides the winning team, the following projects were also in the running:

APPLE (Autonomous Picking and Palletizing): The project provides solutions in the field of logistics. Here, a mobile manipulation system was developed to enable the LBR iiwa to navigate independently as well as to pick objects up and set them down. The project team comes from the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS) of Örebro University in Sweden.
CATCH (Compliant Articulated Robot Catching): The project enables the KUKA LBR iiwa to gently catch flying objects of uneven shape. This is made possible through a compliance controller and a two-phase process. The project was carried out by a research team from the “Learning Algorithms and System Laboratory (LASA)” department of the EPFL Lausanne.
ROBOCUT (Robots Decrypt the Human History): The project is used for experimental archaeology. The KUKA LBR iiwa is thus able to analyze Stone Age tools and research their prehistoric use. The team comes from the Archaeological Research Center and Museum in Neuwied as well as the Agile and Dexterous Robotics Lab (ADRL) at ETH Zurich.