SaraFun

SARAFUn project

This activity was funded by the European project Sarafun.

The SARAFun project aims at enabling a non-expert user to integrate a new bi-manual assembly task on a robot in less than a day. This objective gathers the following technologies:

• Bi-manual robot system capable to learn the assembly of two parts by human demonstration
• Teaching of assembly through physical human-robot interaction
• Integrated planning framework to plan grasps and optimize the finger design for industrial grippers.
• Strategies to improve and maintain grasp stability for industrial grippers.

The following video illustrates the main outcomes of the project:

Learning through human demonstration

We have been contribution on analyzing how human demonstration of assembly processed could be used to identify and characterize the manipulation skills involved, and the tuning of the manipulation skills according to the object to manipulate.

In particular, we have studied how the instantaneous work could be used to segment manipulation demonstration, as illustrated on the following videos.

Illustration of the segmentation of an insertion manipulation (involving sliding and folding).

Illustration of the segmentation of a folding manipulation.

Details of the approach used is detailed in the ROBOT paper on the instantaneous work.

This work has been disseminated through the publications mentioned below, and:

• through contributions to workshop at the European Robotic Forum, in 2017 and 2018.
• the organization of a workshop at IROS 2017, Human in-the-loop robotic manipulation: on the influence of the human role, in collaboration with Yiannis Karayannidis, Yasemin Bekiroglu and Justus Piater.
• an invited talk at IROS 2018, in the workshop entitled Human-robot cooperation and collaboration in manipulation: advancements and challenges: Observing human assembly: lessons learned.

Work in collaboration with Asier Fernandez, Irati Rasines, Joe McIntyre, Julius Klein and Miguel Prada.