MANiBOT

Despite the advances in robotics, fast, dexterous and robust objects handling, resembling human’s performance, is limited to industrial applications and takes place in controlled settings with pre-programmed tasks focusing on a-priori known objects.  Endowing service robots with advanced physical intelligence that enables them to efficiently interact with their environment and manipulate a wide variety of diverse objects which are not known in advance, in a human-like manner and performance is still an unmet goal. The challenge gets even harder when the objects touch or exceed the robot’s payload capacity as well as when the manipulation takes place in real world, human-populated environments with spatial constraints.

The MANiBOT project aims to research and develop a bimanual mobile robotic platform able to address the aforementioned challenges through advanced perception, control and cognition methods and novel mechatronics. New multimodal environment understanding and object/pose recognition methods are developed based on real-time adaptive fusion of vision, proximity and tactile sensing, enabling fast, safe and efficient manipulation of diverse objects with various sizes, shapes, material and rigidity, which are not a-priori known or modelled beforehand, in diverse human populated environments. The object handling is performed through the use of a novel suite of manipulation primitives along with bimanual manipulation aiming to achieve performance close to that of humans even under significant spatial constraints. Through non-prehensile primitives (e.g. push, pitch, drag), which utilize supporting surfaces from the environment, the manipulation of heavy or cluttered items is enabled in an energy efficient way.  An advanced multi-level robot cycle framework for cognitive functions orchestrates the above sensing and actuation methods towards efficient and trustworthy behavior that allows learning, composing and swiftly adapting for complex manipulations. The innovative methods of MANiBOT are coupled with novel cognitive mechatronics based on tactile and proximity sensors, integrated within state of the art bimanual mobile manipulation robot, optimized for energy efficiency and increased autonomy, including HRI capabilities for trustworthy and efficient operation.

The above capabilities of the MANiBOT system could have tremendous impact in major sectors of industry and services, from logistics and transport to retail, agri-food and manufacturing, where the use of MANiBOT technologies could give added value and provide a drastic boost in robot utilization in such sectors. MANiBOT’s use cases are indicative of the wide range of areas of potential use of the proposed technologies, since they entail very diverse handling tasks, i.e. shelves’ restocking in supermarkets and baggage handling in airports.