Dynamic Manipulation

Current Project Grants

Dynamic agile robots that learn and optimize operations

Past Project Grants

1 January 2020 – 31 March 2024

Europe is leading the market of torque-controlled robots. These robots can withstand physical interaction with the environment, including impacts, while providing accurate sensing and actuation capabilities. I.AM. leverages this technology and strengthens European leadership by endowing robots to exploit intentional impacts for manipulation. I.AM. focuses on impact aware manipulation in logistics, a new area of application for robotics which will grow exponentially in the coming years, due to socio-economical drivers such as booming of e-commerce and scarcity of labor

CogIMon

1 February 2015 – 31 May 2019

Compliant control in humans is exploited in a variety of sophisticated skills. These include solitary actions such as soft catching, sliding, pushing large objects as well as joint actions performed in teams such as mainpulation of large scale objects or mutual adaptation through phyiscal coupling for learning, in walking or in execution of joint tasks. This advanced ability of organizing versatile motion is refer under varying contact and impedance as cognitive compliant interaction in motion. The COgIMon project aims at a step-change in human-robot interaction toward the systemic integration of robust, dependable interaction capabilities for teams of humans and compliant robots, in particular the compliant humanoid COMAN.

RoboHow

1 February 2012 – 31 July 2016

In order to make robots achieve robust, adaptive, effective and natural performance of everyday manipulation tasks, it is not feasible to expect that programmers can equip the robots with plan libraries that cover such open-ended task spectrum competently. ROBOHOW.Cog targets at enabling autonomous robots to perform expanding sets of human-scale tasks – both in human working and living environments. To this end, RoboHow.Cog will investigate a new approach to robot programming and control where knowledge for accomplishing tasks is semi-automatically acquired from instructions in the World Wide Web, from humaninstruction and from demonstration.

AMARSi

1 March 2010 – 28 February 2014

The motor skills of today’s robots still must be qualified as poor. The AMARSi Integrated Project aims at a qualitative jump toward biological richness of robotic motor skills. To achieve this goal, a number of innovativescientific concepts and interdisciplinary research methods will be implemented.
Acquiring rich motor skills will change the role of robots in our human’s society in two fundamental ways. First, such robots will be much more versatile than today, with greatly expanded ranges of practical usages. And second, the naturalness and compliance of their motor behavior will make them blend into the everyday routines of human society, physically safe and psychologically acceptable.