Project description
Innovative AI-Powered Manipulation System for Smart robots
Creating machines capable of directly interacting with the environment is a critical challenge in robotics. Research on robot manipulation aiming to produce machines capable of directly and autonomously interacting with the environment has increased in the last decades. Learning will be pivotal to such autonomous systems. The EU-funded IntelliMan project will focus on how a robot can efficiently learn to manipulate in a purposeful and highly performant way. The project will develop an innovative AI-Powered Manipulation System with persistent learning capabilities, able to perceive characteristics and features of the environment through a heterogeneous set of sensors, decide how to execute a task autonomously, detect failures in the task execution, and request new knowledge.
Objective
A key challenge in intelligent robotics is creating robots that are capable of directly interacting with the world around them to achieve their goals. On the other hand, robot manipulation is central to achieve the promise of robotics, since the definition of robot requires that it has actuators that it can use to change the world.
In the last decades, a substantial growth has been observed in research on the problem of robot manipulation, which aims to exploit the increasing availability of affordable robot arms and grippers to create machines capable of directly and autonomously interacting with the world to implement useful applications. Learning will be central to such autonomous systems, as the real world contains too many variations for a robot to have an accurate model of human requests and behaviour, of the surrounding environment, the objects in it, or the skills required to manipulate them, in advance.
The main objective of the IntelliMan project is focusing on the question of “How a robot can efficiently learn to manipulate in a purposeful and highly performant way”. IntelliMan will range from learning individual manipulation skills from human demonstration, to learning abstract descriptions of a manipulation task suitable for high-level planning, to discovering an object’s functionality by interacting with it, to guarantee performance and safety. IntelliMan aims at developing a novel AI-Powered Manipulation System with persistent learning capabilities, able to perceive the main characteristics and features of its surrounding by means of a heterogeneous set of sensors, able to decide how to execute a task in an autonomous way and able to detect failures in the task execution in order to request new knowledge through the interaction with humans and the environment. IntelliMan further investigates how such AI-powered manipulation systems are perceived by the users and what factors enhance human acceptability.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringrobotics
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologyimplants
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
40126 Bologna
Italy