The mobile assistance robot ANNIE was developed by the Fraunhofer IFF in Magdeburg, Germany, as a universal system able to be used for a large number of industrially relevant applications. The robot was intended as a development platform, both for showcasing individual technologies and for test and development of the necessary software and systems integrations tools necessary for supporting such a universal system.
For the life-science scenario we demonstrate in this video, the robot must be able to autonomously navigate to different rooms, including being able to open a standard door. It needs to pick up microwell plates from a table that were prepared by a human lab assistant and put them into a larger carrier for efficiency. Next, the plates need to be taken to a drop-off point representing the load-port of some automated handling machine. These requirements would usually call for different grippers specific to the objects that require handling (plates, carrier, door handle). However, we were able to successfully use the 3-finger robotic hand for all handling and manipulation tasks in this scenario. A further novelty shown in the video is how the robot is able to identify the microwell plates, which are made of glossy, transparent plastic and are generally difficult to identify with traditional machine vision systems. Our approach, whereby we use a light field camera to identify such transparent and glossy parts is demonstrated here.
The novel programming system shown in the video allows the user to define a process as a sequence of parameterized skills (i.e. basic functionalities), giving them a quick visual overview of the entire task and a simplified means for programming a complex robotic system.
The ISABEL project has received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant agreement no. 01IM12006C (ISABEL).
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