ECROBOT · European and Chinese Platform for Robotics and Applications

European and Chinese Platform for Robotics and Applications

Publishable summary: ECROBOT project has established a long-term collaboration platform between EU countries and China in robotics research. Through a large number of staff exchanges, the EU and Chinese partners of the project investigated robotic technologies in sensing and actuation, cognition and control, and human-robot interaction, and developed exploitable techniques for industrial robots, service robots, and micro and nano handling robots. In particular, based on a thorough literature review, the project is able to foresee the trend of technology development for health care robots in the new 5-, 10-, and 15-years. The investigation in sensing and actuation focused on techniques that support localisation for mobile robots, mobile sensor network, structure light based vision, and more controllable probe holder and laser holder of AFMs and MFMs for nano handling. The emphasis of cognition and human-robot interaction was on the recognition of human’s intention, human motion modelling and on automated robot ontology. Robot control concentrated on automatic control of UAV. The staff exchanges strongly supported the robotic systems development undertaken in project partners’ institutes, which includes the lower mobility parallel manipulators for industrial assembly line applications, the continuum manipulator for MIS, the structured light based 3D vision system and robot manipulator for offshore oil and gas platform inspection and maintenance, the vision-aided inertial navigation system, the upper limb rehabilitation robot, and AFMs and MFMs for nano handling and measuring. The consortium achieved the following exploitable research and development outcomes: 1 Potential field method for robot navigation 2 Robot localization based on Kalman filter and Particle filter 3 Simultaneously Localization and mapping (SLAM) 4 Face recognition based HMI 5 Voice recognition based HMI 6 Brain signal (EEG) based HMI 7 Muscle signal (EMG) based HMI 8 Robotic wheelchair control 9 UAV plan, navigation, and control 10 Robotic fish navigation and control 11 Artificial neural network based robot behaviour 12 Fuzzy controller of robot behaviour 13 Reinforcement learning and GA learning of robot behaviour 14 Robot swarm and flocking 15 Mobile wireless sensor network 16 Robot coordination and cooperation 17 Model predictive control of robot motion 18 Back-stepping control of robot motion 19 Robust control of robot motion 20 Robot skill learning 21 Symbolic grounding 22 Interaction between human and human-companion robots 23 Robot motion planning 24 Uncertainty handling in natural language processing 25 Robotic lifting chair control 26 Human intention recognition and prediction 27 Ontology 28 Semi-autonomous and remote-controllable robotics 29 Nano-robotics 30 Theory of Robotic Nano Manipulation and its implementation 31 Micro/Nano Robotics for Biomedical Application 32 Aerial search and rescue robot 33 Explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robot 34 Amphibious reconfigurable robot research 35 Robot system for planetary exploration 36 High-speed visual odometer methods for field robot 37 Medical robots 38 Industrial robots 39 Mobile robots 40 Power transmission line inspection robots 41 Modular robots 42 Kinematic performance evaluation method of parallel robots 43 Unified parameter modelling method of lower mobility robots 44 Prototype design technology of parallel robots 45 Humanoid Robotics 46 Quadrupedal Robotics 47 Rehabilitation Robotics 48 Physical Human-Robotic Interaction 49 Locomotion and Gait Generation 50 Actuation Technology 51 Haptics 52 Telepresence 53 Dextrous Manipulation 54 Human-Robot Interfaces 55 Micro-manipulation 56 Balance and Locomotion Control 57 SLS principles 58 SLS system development 59 3D image processing 60 Orientation and position of object for robotics 61 Quality inspection 62 ANN, SVM, DT for object classification 63 Intelligent decision-making 64 Modelling and predicting The project partners published more than 90 research papers, organised a organised IROS 2015 Conference, ECROBOT special sessions in 3MN 2013 - 2015 conferences, IWAMA2013 – 2015 conferences, a number of workshops and seminars for the purpose of dissemination and obtained 6 patents in nano handling and measuring. The project partners also collaborated in further funding applications at both national and EU levels. The staff exchanges strongly supported the robotic systems development undertaken in project partners’ institutes, which includes the lower mobility parallel manipulators for industrial assembly line applications, the continuum manipulator for MIS, the structured light based 3D vision system and robot manipulator for offshore oil and gas platform inspection and maintenance, the vision-aided inertial navigation system, the upper limb rehabilitation robot, and AFMs and MFMs for nano handling and measuring. The project partners published about 70 research papers, organised a number of workshops and seminars for the purpose of dissemination and obtained 6 patents in nano handling and measuring.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union