Robutler (2002–2005)

In the aging societies of the industrialized world, there will be an increasing demand for intelligent machines performing services in interaction or collaboration with humans. These machines will share with us our living environment and will have to perform everyday tasks in human-like manners. As a consequence, in the field of service robotics, systems are needed that can handle everyday objects in unconstraint environments, in much the same way as they are handled by humans.

Interaction with changing and, hence, only partially known environments requires intelligent sensor-data processing and advanced control architectures. Addressing this challenge for robotics, we present a mobile hand-arm system with anthropomorphic features as well as some capability for autonomous behavior. The system integrates, on the hardware side, a mobile platform, an arm optimized for light weight, and an articulated dexterous four-finger hand with, on the software side, basic navigation skills, real-time scene analysis by stereo vision, compliant motion control, and an intuitive man-machine interface. We have called this system the Robutler.

Construction

The system is based on a four wheeled mobile platform which was originally built by the Technical University of Munich / Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR). We changed the wheels control electronic part to integrate the platform into our control architecture ...

Control

The mobile platform basically has four drivable and steerable wheels. In contrary to the castor like configuration used in some robots, the steering and the drive axes of each wheel intersect. Therefore the mobile platform is omnidirectional, but nonholonomic ...

Methods

The task of vision for a service robot is to deliver an interpretation of the scene that contains both geometric and semantic information. In other words, the Robutler has to know where objects are placed and what can be done with them. Clearly, the semantics of an object is not generally conceivable from vision alone ...

Presentations / Scenarios

World Space Congress, Houston 2002, Automatica 2004 ...

Publications