Skip to main content
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary

Bimanual Manipulation of Rigid and Deformable Objects

Project description

Helping robots better interact with deformable objects

Tasks that humans find simple and trivial are complex and difficult for a robot to perform. When interacting with objects, the robot needs a greater understanding of the geometrical, topological and physical properties of these objects. This can be done either by modelling and representing these properties or by learning them from data. The main goal of the EU-funded BIRD project is to create new informative and compact representations of deformable objects that incorporate both analytical and learning-based approaches. The new representations should also encode geometric, topological and physical information about the robot, the object and the environment. The project's results are expected to reveal more about sensorimotor behaviour in bimanual robot systems.

Objective

All day long, our fingers touch, grasp and move objects in various media such as air, water, oil. We do this almost effortlessly - it feels like we do not spend time planning and reflecting over what our hands and fingers do or how the continuous integration of various sensory modalities such as vision, touch, proprioception, hearing help us to outperform any other biological system in the variety of the interaction tasks that we can execute. Largely overlooked, and perhaps most fascinating is the ease with which we perform these interactions resulting in a belief that these are also easy to accomplish in artificial systems such as robots. However, there are still no robots that can easily hand-wash dishes, button a shirt or peel a potato. Our claim is that this is fundamentally a problem of appropriate representation or parameterization. When interacting with objects, the robot needs to consider geometric, topological, and physical properties of objects. This can be done either explicitly, by modeling and representing these properties, or implicitly, by learning them from data. The main scientific objective of this project is to create new informative and compact representations of deformable objects that incorporate both analytical and learning-based approaches and encode geometric, topological, and physical information about the robot, the object, and the environment. We will do this in the context of challenging multimodal, bimanual object interaction tasks. The focus will be on physical interaction with deformable objects using multimodal feedback. To meet these objectives, we will use theoretical and computational methods together with rigorous experimental evaluation to model skilled sensorimotor behavior in bimanual robot systems.

Host institution

KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HOEGSKOLAN
Net EU contribution
€ 2 424 186,00
Address
BRINELLVAGEN 8
100 44 Stockholm
Sweden

See on map

Region
Östra Sverige Stockholm Stockholms län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 2 424 186,25

Beneficiaries (1)