Perception and Manipulation Laboratory - IRI

The Perception and Manipulation Laboratory of the Industrial Robotics and Informatics Institute (IRI) occupies 142 m2 on the second floor of the FME, and part of it houses a full-scale model of a small apartment (35 m2). Two TIAGo PAL mobile single-arm robots inhabit the apartment, but are occasionally taken out to experiment elsewhere. There is also a handling area equipped with four collaborative manipulator robots (two WAM and two KINOVA robots), and workstations are distributed along the perimeter. Next to the laboratory, with a direct view through a window, is the scientific-technical support office. The laboratory is also equipped with commercial and self-developed clamps, detection devices and augmented reality systems. The lab service offers rapid experimental setup, various standardized software tools, and expertise in robot control and perception algorithms. The lab also hosted the Humanoids Lab Initiative in the past, and we still maintain 15 small humanoid robots for educational or promotional purposes.

CLOTHILDE: Cloth manipulation learning from demonstration

CLOTHILDE is an ERC Advanced Grant project led by Professor Carme Torras. Its aim is to establish the foundations of versatile tissue manipulation using robots. The theoretical foundation will be to relate machine learning and computational topology methods, in order to develop a theory of clothing deformation under manipulation that leads to a general framework for robots to learn to manipulate clothing from human demonstrations . This framework includes: non-expert teaching of a task, robot perception and skill learning, task-oriented clothing representation, probabilistic planning, robot task execution under different initial conditions, fault diagnosis, and informed requests from 'human aid.

SYMBIOTS: Facilitating an introduction of robotics to new processes and applications within the industry

SIMBIOTS was a project of the RIS3CAT 2016 call for ACCIÓ (Generalitat de Catalunya) within the Comunitat d'Indústries del Futur, which was led by the IRI. The project focused on two lines of work aimed at facilitating an introduction of robotics to new processes and applications within the industry:

- The implementation of shared workspaces between robots and safe operators, where the robots work autonomously and/or cooperatively guaranteeing the safety of the operators, allowing the elimination of physical barriers.

- The improvement of ergonomics and productivity by implementing collaborative robots that work cooperatively with operators.

HuMoUR: Markerless 3D human motion understanding for adaptive robot behavior

HUMOUR was a national project that ended in 2021. Its goal was to develop new computer vision tools to estimate and understand human movement using a simple camera and use that information as a demonstration to teach a purpose-built robotic assistant general to perform new complex manipulation tasks. In robotics, this learning paradigm is called demonstration learning: a non-expert teacher repeatedly performs a task so that the robot can learn the steps and variability of the actions.

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Equipment

2 robots TIAGO Steel PAL Robotics
2 robots manipuladors WAM
2 robots manipuladors KINOVA Gen3 Ultra Lightweight