Multi agent collaborative robots
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MSCA-2020-BVanderborght05
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Beschrijving van het project
VUB-Brubotics has a strong track record in human-robot interaction in manufacturing setting using cobots and exoskeletons. To address the increasing demand for flexible automation in assembly (e.g. warehouses, infrastructure, agriculture), where rescue and disaster response, etc; the task complexity or flexibility is too high for a single robot to accomplish or the task is inherently distributed in space. Under these circumstances, building several resource-bounded mobile robots is much better than having a single powerful robot. Besides their increased robustness through redundancy, one of the main advantages is that multiple robots can solve problems faster using parallelism. Traditional centralized control approaches cannot be used with these systems due to, e.g. centralized computational issues or issues with centralized modelling, data collection, and actuation. A complete centralized or hierarchical control will suffer from network delays, high dimensionality, uncertainty, jitter, inability to cope with unavailability of agents, etc. It is at this point where distributed controllers come into play. The idea behind distributed control approaches is simple: the centralized problem is divided in several different parts whose control is assigned to a certain number of local controllers on each robot. Therefore, each robot does not have a global vision of the problem. Depending on the degree of interaction that exists between the local subsystems, the robots may need to communicate so that they can coordinate themselves. However, this paradigm also brings extra challenges on the level of communication and control. The issues that must be addressed in developing multi-robot solutions are dependent upon the task requirements and the sensory and effector capabilities of the available robots. The agents need to be smart, exhibiting a high degree of intelligence and autonomy and need to be able to exchange information. Therefore Brubotics is working on the Explicit Reference Governor concept. Moreover, complex tasks are difficult to solve with fully pre-programmed agent behaviours; instead the agents should be equipped with functionality to discover a solution on their own, using learning techniques, such as Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. Within the context of multiple mobile and networked robot systems will be developed. The Proof of Concept will be consisting of several (different) robots in a sensorized room interconnected over a shared network. Also, humans should be able to enter the zone as collaborative agent.
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Brussels Human Robotics Research Center
The Robotics & MultiBody Mechanics research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) started its activities in 1990. In 1995 they started the research on soft actuators in legged robots to absorb impact, interact with an unknown environment and energy efficiency. Currently, the group is well known for the design and control of variable stiffness actuators, implemented in robots with applications in physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) and cognitive HRI (cHRI). During last years, within the group were developed the compliant actuators Pleated Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PPAM 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0), different versions of the MACCEPA actuator and the SPEA actuator, funded by an ERC Starting Grant and initiated the research towards self-healing actuators. In the ERC we worked on the ambitious breakthrough to develop a material-oriented solution by implementing self-healing (SH) materials for actuators, for which was collaborated with material scientists (VUB-FYSC).
Appropriate control architectures for soft actuators are designed for improved safety, robustness and energy efficiency. The actuators are implemented on different legged robots like the monopod OLIE, the pneumatic biped Lucy, the MACCEPA powered Veronica and H2R biped and the hopping robot Chobino1D. The research towards legged robots and Variable Stiffness Actuators also lead to the development of prostheses (ankle-foot IPPAM, AMPFOOT 1.0-4.0, currently made a spinoff company Axiles Bionics and the knee-ankle HEKTA and Cyberlegs prostheses) and exoskeletons for the lower limbs like Altacro, CORBYS, Biomot and Mirad. The research is performed from fundamental studies, towards application driven research and valorization and is core lab in the Flemish Strategic Research Center “Flanders Make” for the manufacturing industry. R&MM is the leader in the BruBOTICS consortium combining all robotics related expertise of the VUB together from exact and applied sciences (AI, sensors), human physiology and rehabilitation and social/economic studies with more than 90 academic researchers.
Recently, there is a strong trend in both the research community and in the industry toward the development of collaborative robots, the so called cobots. R&MM researchers successfully accomplished a project in manufacturing robots, the ICON Claxon during which the first coworking robot was installed on the assembly line of Audi. In another project SBO-Yves, apart from workspace sharing, also collaborative assembly is investigated, combining the strengths of both the human and the robot while taking the ergonomic load of the human into account. Finally, R&MM group is involved in studies on ergonomics: Flanders Make ICONs Ergoeyehand (improving ergonomics by cobots), ICON Smarthandler (manipulation heavy objects) and the ICON Prorob (VR/AR based robot trajectory programming to improve ergonomics and productivity).Up to now R&MM group was involved in 14 EU projects and 1 ERC grant and counts 45 researchers, working in strong multidisciplinary teams.