clothilde.iri.upc.edu

SOFTENABLE: New EU project on robotic manipulation

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 09:49:58 +0000

The Perception and Manipulation group at IRI is member of a new European project proposal that has recently been selected for funding under the Horizon Europe actions, at the "Digital and emerging technologies for competitiveness and fit for the green deal" call.

This new project, to be called "SOFTENABLE: Towards Soft Fixture-Based Manipulation Primitives Enabling Safe Robotic Manipulation in Hazardous Healthcare and Food Handling
Applications", will start this Autumn and will be led by Prof. Florian Pokorny from KTH, Sweden. On behalf of IRI, the participation of our researchers will be led by Prof. Carme Torras.
Other members of the consortium will be DLR, Germany; Technion, Israel; Ocado Innovation, United Kingdom; and Fundació Clínic per a la Recerca Biomédica, Spain.
It is worth noting that Prof. Pokorny was invited to IRI in 2019 by the Clothilde project and with him we held a number of working sessions and initiated a collaboration that has resulted in the achievement of this project.

Prof. Bruno Siciliano visits CLOTHILDE team

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 09:20:45 +0000

Professor Bruno Siciliano from PRISMA Lab at University of Naples Federico II, Italy, was visiting Perception and Manipulation Lab at IRI on 2022 February 17th.
Prof. Siciliano is a leading expert in the field of robotics and, after giving a seminar at the UPC, he got to know the activities of the Perception and Manipulation group at IRI, especially those related to the Clothilde project. He was able to discuss with Prof. Torras and the other researchers in the group about the latest advances in assistive robotics.

New collaboration with LIS group from Aix-Marseille Université (France)

admin — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 16:23:10 +0000

On 2019 October 10th, CLOTHILDE team received the visit of researchers from the Laboratoire d’Informatique et Systèmes (LIS), Aix-Marseille Université, France.
The guests were Professor Alexandre Bac, Professor Aldo González-Lorenzo and their PhD Student Ludovic Grosse.

First of all, our researcher Júlia Borràs presented her work in manipulation and later our postdoc Fabio Strazzeri explained his research in cloth state representation. Next, a visit to the Perception Laboratory guided by Guillem Alenyà took place. After, our PhD student Franco Coltraró talked about his work in cloth simulation.

Researchers of LIS group presented their work in computational topology and a discussion and a brainstorming session with CLOTHILDE team was carried out. Finally, our researcher Adrià Colomé presented his work in skill learning and a different possibilities of scientific collaboration between both groups were discussed.

Debate: “Is it possible to implement/program ethics in robotics?”

admin — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 14:09:18 +0000

The field of ethics in the interaction between humans and robots is receiving a lot of interest, and several ideas have recently appeared principally in the kind of ethics that are desirable. In this first symposium celebrated July 23rd 2019, we paid attention to the practical implementation and the feasibility of embedding these behaviors in current robots.
A debate moderated by Guillem Alenyà was conducted with Pablo Jiménez, Alberto Olivares, Alejandro Suárez and Irene García, with the presence of all the members of the P&M Lab.

In this document you can see a summary of the debate.

Dr. Eren Erdal Aksoy gives a seminar to CLOTHILDE team

admin — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 12:01:46 +0000

On 2019 July 19th, CLOTHILDE team received the visit of Dr. Eren Erdal Aksoy from Halmstad University, Sweden.

Dr. Aksoy offered a research seminar to IRI:
Title: A Holistic View on Manipulation Semantics: From Robot Perception to Execution
Description: Robots require a generic action representation in order to recognize, learn, and imitate observed tasks without any human intervention. Defining such a representation is a challenging problem due to the high inter-individual variability that emerges during the execution of actions. Conventional methods approach this problem by either considering continuous trajectory profiles or employing predefined symbolic action knowledge. The main challenge, however, still remains in linking perceived continuous sensory signals to discrete symbolic object or action concepts.
In this talk, I will promote a new holistic view on manipulation semantics, which combines the perception and execution of manipulation actions in one unique framework, so-called “Semantic Event Chain” (SEC). The SEC concept is an implicit spatiotemporal formulation that encodes actions by coupling the observed effect with the exhibited roles of manipulated objects. In the first part of the talk, I will explain how such a semantic action encoding can allow robots to link continuous visual sensory signals (e.g. image sequences) to their symbolic descriptions (e.g. action primitives). I will then elaborate on creating a robot-agnostic semantic library of actions to be further employed to generate complex chained manipulation sequences while grounding high-level symbolic plans into the low-level sensory-motor. To highlight the scalability of manipulation semantics, I will finally introduce various applications of SECs on learning object affordances, coupling language and vision, and memorizing episodic experiences.

Dr. Thomas Feix from Adidas visits CLOTHILDE team

admin — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 22:00:00 +0000

On June 20th, CLOTHILDE team received the visit of Dr. Thomas Feix, researcher of the FUTURE team of ADIDAS.

In this meeting Dr. Feix was able to get to know the research of the IRI Perception and Manipulation group and there were discussions about grippers designs and different approaches to taxonomy.

euRobotics Board of Directors at the Perception and Manipulation Laboratory

admin — Sun, 03 Jun 2018 22:00:00 +0000

On June 4, EuRobotics Board of Directors visited IRI and in addition to visiting the whole centre, they were able to get to know first hand the research being carried out in Clohtilde project and IRI's Perception and Manipulation Group.

Workshop on Topology by Prof. Pokorny from KTH

admin — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 07:43:56 +0000

The days 24 and 25th April 2018, Prof. Florian T. Pokorny, from the School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, offered a Workshop on Topology to the CLOTHILDE members at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC
He presented his work around motion planning and clustering up to homology classes, and also force-closure vs caging-based approaches to manipulation and the state of the art.

Carme Torras gets the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for her project CLOTHILDE

admin — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 07:43:56 +0000

The European Research Council (ERC) grants are aimed at supporting the best researchers in the search for excellence in science, a basic pillar of the Horizon 2020 European research and innovation funding program. ERC Advanced Grants provide long term funding for established, leading principal investigators that pursue ground-breaking high-risk projects.

The CLOTHILDE project

CLOTHILDE, Cloth manipulation learning from demonstrations, the project presented by Professor Torras, will receive 2.5 million euros for a period of 5 years to develop a theory of robotic manipulation of textiles. The robots to be used will learn manipulation skills through demonstrations performed by non-expert users, which will be coded using representations of computational topology and then improved through automatic learning techniques. Some of the prototype applications to be developed include recognizing and folding clothes, putting a cover on a mattress or car seat and helping the elderly and disabled to get dressed.

Why research with textile objects?

Textile objects pervade human environments and their versatile manipulation by robots would open a whole range of possibilities, from the increase of autonomy for the elderly or disabled people, to the autonomous cleaning and hospital logistics, or new automation in the handling of garments in the textile sector.

Although there are effective procedures for the robotic handling of rigid objects and the virtual representation of deformable objects, the manipulation of textiles is still difficult to achieve due to the large number of degrees of freedom involved in the deformations of non-rigid objects and the uncertainties in perception and action. Therefore, CLOTHILDE is presented as a pioneering, necessary and innovative project in this field of robotics.

Prof. Carme Torras

Dr. Torras is an expert in robotics and artificial intelligence. She is the leader of the Perception and Manipulation research group at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial in Barcelona, a joint research center of the Spanish National Research Council and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Her group carries out research at the frontier between robotics and artificial intelligence, specifically in machine learning, geometric reasoning, computer vision and robot motion planning.

Professor Torras, a recipient of the Narcís Monturiol Medal, is Fellow of the European Society for Artificial Intelligence; Member of the Academia Europaea; the Institut d'Estudis Catalans; the Reial Acadèmia de Ciències i Arts de Barcelona; and of the recently constituted Scientific and Technical Committee of the Agencia Estatal de Investigación in Spain, the main advisory body of this organization.