• H2020
• Industrial Leadership
• ICT

Researchers are benefitting from just under €5.7m of Horizon 2020 funding to improve the interaction between humans and robots.

The ‘Cognitive Interaction in Motion’, or CogIMon, project is being led by Bielefeld University, Germany, and focuses on humanoid as well as industrial robots. The venture has a total budget of just under €7m and involves six other international partners.

Speaking about the project, co-ordinator Professor Dr Jochen Steil said: “The goal of CogIMon is to teach robots to understand the forces during the movement of objects and how to appropriately react to changes in weight or contact with the object while carrying it.

“Robots can measure their own force and regulate it to a certain degree. They can stop their movements or ease off, but they have not yet been able to understand forces or actively control them to take part in a joint effort. We want to change that.

“Understanding active forces is a big challenge because it entails complex, highly skilled interaction that combines abilities from a number of different areas. Perception, the ability to move objects, controlling flexibility and body motion are a few examples.”

At this time, there is little theory to help explain how robots can move objects together with humans. As such, project partners in Italy and the UK are conducting basic research using interaction experiments with humans.

The researchers are also planning to develop an additional application for industry using a KUKA lightweight robot. Such robots could be used in factories, for instance, to lift large packages together into shelves and sort them. For this industrial application, it is considered important that the robots learn to correctly assess the dynamic characteristics of objects in order to properly lift packages of different weights and exterior surfaces.

The project will run until 2019.