Help is at hand

Robot assistants learn on the job

THE TEAM OF technicians working in the world’s largest online-only supermarket has gained a new pair of hands that’s not only smart, but also strong. The ARMAR-6 prototype collaborative robot that has emerged from the Secondhands project will test and develop new technologies related to the maintenance and repair of automation equipment for Uk-based online supermarket Ocado. The maintenance techies have their work cut out keeping Ocado’s highly automated warehouses, known as Customer Fulfilment Centres (CFC), running smoothly: the company delivers more than 260 000 customer orders a week.

Secondhands is an Eu-funded Horizon 2020 project that combines the skills of world-class researchers focusing on a real-world industrial use case. Among Secondhands’ objects are the creation of a knowledge base to facilitate proactive help, a high degree of human-robot interaction and advanced perception skills to function in a dynamic industrial environment. Its robot prototype will learn through observation and will augment human abilities by completing tasks that require a level of precision and physical strength that are not available to humans.

That’s part of the remit of Ocado Technology, which – along with its research partners – is working to advance the technology readiness of areas such as computer vision and cognition, human-robot interaction, mechatronics and perception and ultimately demonstrate how versatile and productive human-robot collaboration can be in practice. ARMAR-6 was developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) by Tamim Asfour and the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T) of the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics. Other research partners include École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Sapienza Università di Roma and University College London (UCL).