IntelliMan

AI-Powered Manipulation System for Advanced Robotic Service, Manufacturing and Prosthetics

Abstract

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 AIpowered manipulation systems are perceived by the users and what factors enhance human acceptability.

Project details

Unibo Team Leader: Gianluca Palli

Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Energia Elettrica e dell'Informazione "Guglielmo Marconi"

Coordinator:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)

Other Participants:
Istituto Nazionale per l'assicurazione contro gli infortuni sul lavoro (INAIL) (Italy)
Università  degli Studi di GENOVA (Italy)
Bayerische Forschungsallianz Bavarian Research Alliance Gmbh (Germany)
Dlr Deutsches Zentrum Fur Luft Und Raumfahrt E.V. (Germany)
Friedrich Alexander Universitaet Erlangen Nuernberg (Germany)
Universitat Politecnica De Catalunya (Spain)
Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" (Italy)
Fundacio Eurecat (Spain)
Elvez, Proizvodnja Kabelske Konfekcije In Predelava Plasticnih Mas Doo (Slovenia)

Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 4.509.303,00
Project Duration in months: 42
Start Date: 01/09/2022
End Date: 28/02/2026

Cordis webpage

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101070136 This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101070136