Description

The goal of SecondHands is to design a robot that can offer help to a maintenance technician in a pro-active manner. The robot will be a second pair of hands that can assist the technician when he/she is in need of help. Thus, the robot should recognize human activity, anticipate humans needs and pro-actively offer assistance when appropriate, in real-time, and in a dynamically changing real world. The robot assistant will increase the efficiency and productivity of maintenance technicians in order to ensure a smooth running of production machinery thereby maximizing output and return on investment.

KIT leads the tasks of the design of the new robot, grasping and mobile manipulation as well as natural language and multimodal interfaces. Based on the ARMAR humanoid robot technologies, a new humanoid robot for maintenance tasks will be developed and validated in several maintenance tasks in a warehouse environment. A special focus is the development of methods for task-specific grasping of familiar objects, object handover, vison- and haptic-based reactive grasping strategies as well as mobile manipulation tasks while taking into account uncertainties in perception and action. To facilitate natural human-robot interaction, KIT will implement a speech recognition, and dialogue management system to enable maintenance technicians to conduct spoken dialog with the robot.