Physical Cognition for Intelligent Control and Safe Human-Robot Interaction

ended

Sestosenso develops technologies for the next generations of collaborative robots capable of self-adapting to different time-varying operational conditions and capable of safe and smooth adaptation from autonomous to interactive when human intervention is required either for collaboration or training/teaching. The project proposes a new sensing technology from the hardware and up to the cognitive perception and control levels, based on proximity and tactile sensors embedded in the robot body, providing a unified proxy-tactile perception of the environment, required to control the robot's actions and interactions, safely and autonomously. Sestosenso is motivated by the industrial need to integrate workers with robots and the need for robots that could operate safely without out-of-the-robot infrastructure, thus reducing robot setup times and costs and increasing the flexibility of the shopfloor configuration. The Sestosenso technology is demonstrated by three Use Cases of industrial interest: cooperative assembly (automotive), handling and packaging (logistics), and cooperative harvesting (agriculture).