This last Thursday 28 of February a team of PAL employees visited the MWC2013 to participate into the Intel Cloud ServicesHackathon with the last version of our service robot REEM H3.
The team was composed by Jonathan Gonzalez, Hilario Tome, Sergio Ramos, Eric Marcos and Sammy Pfeiffer. Together they managed to integrate some parts of the Intel Cloud API into the webserver used by the screen of REEM. They successfully integrated some of the robot’s functionalities via web.
Besides this work, REEM rolled around the event attracting people’s attention and she even made a robot friend at the GSMA stand!
In words of the team:
“We’ve seen a big effort in integrating NFC in our everyday life and we found it quite useful! There were a lot of new cool smartphones and tools to create amazing apps for them. The new location of the event is even bigger and has been taken care of to look incredible. It was a delightful experience!”
After struggling with some little problems and understanding what the team was going to do, they divided the work and got to implement some features about login and location management into the robot.
The REEM team won! Thank you a lot intel for your friendliness and for organizing such a enjoyable event! Same goes for the WIPJAM team, specially for Carlo Longino as he helped us get into the event.
PAL Robotics would love to be there next year with REEM and meet again with all the cool people that our team and the robot met.
Hi, this is José Rodríguez, a master’s graduate from the UPC and support member of Reem@IRI team!. In this blog I will briefly explain the project I developed for my master’s thesis which consisted in providing REEM with door opening skills, allowing it to identify and traverse doors within domestic or office-like scenarios. This project represents a small contribution to the efforts put together by IRI, PAL Robotics and AESS to provide REEM with the most advanced capabilities among service robots!
In general, the developed system relies on the use of an RGBD camera for environment perception and in REEM’s built in modules for navigation and environment interaction. Data is then processed in two main parts:
-A recognition module where 2D and 3D data from the camera is accessed at different stages to detect a door on a frame-by-frame basis.
-A logics module that coordinates the results from the recognition module with a sequence of actions required to deal with doors at different aperture conditions, including some recovery behaviors in case one of the actions fails to be accomplished.
For the recognition module the first step is to find a door with the appropriate size for the robot to go through. In order to do this, the image is divided into regions by means of color segmentation an each one of the resulting regions is scanned to check its actual dimensions at different image levels both horizontally and vertically. The obtained limits are also used to infer other geometrical properties of the door such as aspect ratio and perspective deformation, which are considered later to select the best match from a number of possible candidates.
Once a candidate has been selected, a second detection stage provided with the expected handle location and size performs a final likelihood comparison and outputs the handle coordinates if the handle was found, or continues with the next candidate if the search was unsuccessful.
A similar region-scan principle is applied to detect open doors, with the difference that instead of color regions, depth discontinuities are used to infer object’s boundaries, and the handle detection stage is replaced by a door panel detection stage that estimates the opening side of the door based on the angle differences found at both sides of each candidate.
In both cases, the final candidate represents a 3D region of interest from which the orientation can be robustly estimated by model fitting methods.
With the information obtained from the recognition stage, the robot is able to know how to approach the door and decide which arm to use for the opening task. It is at this point that REEM’s navigation system is requested to approach to the door and the inverse kinematics modules receive a specific motion request based on the door status. On the video below, the proposed set of actions is successfully employed to detect and open a door in a fully simulated environment provided by PAL Robotics.
Further testing and improvements for reliable operation will be carried out with the actual REEM platform and the final skill will be available to see in the upcoming Robocup events. I am sure the team will have an outstanding performance at the competition!
Finally I would like to thank all of the members of Reem@IRI for their great support and enthusiasm during this project, which was the true factor that made any accomplishment possible.
Cheers,
José
For more information on new skills check out also the previous post from @David Martinez on surface cleaning!
On the occasion of the European Robotics Week, REEM has been present in one of the best outreach centers of Europe. The exhibitions and activities are amazing, and REEM had the opportunity of guiding people to most of them. Of course, it became one of the attractions of space during its stay, between 26th November and 2nd December. Not in vain, it was the first time ever that a robot performed service tasks such as providing information, guide and interact with visitors without any supervision.
Visitors interacting with REEM at CosmoCaixa
It was the perfect occasion to study the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) with all type of audiences: from kids to elder people. This study, in collaboration with LaSalle and UPC would show us the common reactions in different situations and different profiles. Scholar groups, families, teenagers, adults… thousands of people came to meet REEM, the tireless and kids-resistant guide!
Contact the business department at business@pal-robotics.com if you want more information about REEM’s participation at CosmoCaixa!
LinuxCon Europe 2012, together with the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, have this year chosen Barcelona for their event, and PAL Robotics happily agreed with the Linux Foundation to have REEM over there the first day to give a “little extra” to the event.
REEM is one of PAL Robotics’ humanoid service robots, which is programmed with tools from the Linux ecosystem, and amongst other things, runs the Ubuntu distribution and the Xenomai real-time kernel.
REEM will welcome attendants during the registration at 8.00 hours in the morning, at the Hotel Fira Palace in Barcelona, and people will be able to interact with REEM during the coffee break and lunch.
Smile and have your picture with REEM!!
The excursion of REEM forms part of an active program to take the robot in the real world, and so various types of stakeholders, from potential customers and suppliers to users, can learn about the robot.
Please contact the business department at business@pal-robotics.com if you want more information about REEM’s participation at LinuxCon Europe 2012!
The acceptance by – mainly – the academic attendants was very positive, and especially REEM made a big impression, being the only real full size humanoid service robot present at the event. REEM was considered to be an interesting R&D platform which can be used by universities and R&D institutions worldwide in order to try out all kinds of software and algorithms.
The booth of PAL Robotics at IROS 2012
PAL Robotics hereby confirmed its interest and enthusiasm to work with the academic world, with whom they already started working some time ago, amongst others on special R&D collaborations, PAL Robotics also supplies the universities worldwide with specific material, and also uses it as a pool from where to hire the best experts (PAL Robotics nowadays has 5 Phd’s amongst its personnel and various interns from different universities!).
If you would like to find out more about what PAL Robotics can offer you, contact us at info@pal-robotics.com
David Martínez reports on his Master Thesis about Automatic Control and Robotics at UPC and PAL Robotics
Hello! I’m David Martínez, a Master’s degree student in Automatic Control and Robotics in the UPC. I joined the REEM@IRI team to do my master thesis in robotics. REEM@IRI is a collaboration between PAL Robotics , IRI and AESS to develop the skills needed by the humanoid service robot REEM – from the Barcelonese company PAL Robotics – to take part in the Robocup@HOME,competition, where robots have to solve everyday tasks, which include people recognition and speech interaction, robot navigation in a domestic environment, and object recognition and grasping.
Robot REEM from PAL Robotics, used in this project
For my master thesis, I worked on the open challenge of the Robocup@HOME where each team can demonstrate new and different skills. We chose to develop surface cleaning skills, which included erasing painted surfaces and cleaning small objects, like lentils or rice.
The method developed has 3 different parts: the perception to get a representation of the environment, a set of actions that are used to clean, and a planner to select the best action sequence for each state. REEM was equipped with a RGBD camera for the perception, and cleaning tools, like for example a cloth, to perform the actions successfully.
- To get observations of the environment, a RGBD camera is used, which provide both depth and color information. Depth is used to segment the dirty surfaces, while color is used to detect the dirty areas and represent them with a set of ellipses.
Perception made
- We also defined a set of actions to clean, which consist in sequences of movements over the dirty areas to clean them. Each action gets better results with different types of dirty areas, making all actions useful for some kind of dirt.
Actions planned to clean a round drawing on the board
- We wanted to choose good action sequences to minimize the time spent cleaning, but we had uncertainty in the perceptions, and also stochastic actions. We decided to used PRADA planner, a fast probabilistic planner, to select good sequences for any given dirty surface. It improved significantly the results in complex tasks over using simple reactive methods.
The final result can be seen here:
REEM cleaning a whiteboard
It has been a very good experience being part of the REEM@IRI team. I have had the opportunity to learn a lot of things, worked with advanced real robots capable of performing many skills, met great people and I have had a very good time. I would like to thank everyone in the team, especially Dr. Ricardo Téllez from PAL Robotics, and Doctor Guillem Alenya from IRI who did a great job coordinating the efforts of the team, and I am looking forward to see what awesome skills we will make for future Robocup competitions.
Cheers,
David
For more information on this project, please contact David, Ricardo or Guillem:
David Martínez can be reached at: dmartinez@iri.upc.edu
Ricardo Téllez can be reached at: ricardo.tellez@pal-robotics.com
Guillem Alenya can be reached at: galenya@iri.upc.edu
PAL Robotics was subscribed as Founding Member of euRobotics aisbl (Association internationale Sans But Lucratif) that is the private partner of PPP.
The European Robotics Public Private Partnership (PPP) is the teaming up of the robotics industry, research, academia and the European Commission to launch a joint research, development and innovation program in order to strengthen the position of European robotics as a whole. The program will be jointly developed by the private side (robotics manufacturers, component manufacturers, systems integrators, end users, research institutes, universities) and the public side (the European Commission).
The main objective of the Robotics PPP is to boost current European robotics research, development and innovation. It also aims to cultivate a positive perception of robotics in order to assure competitiveness and industrial leadership of manufacturers, providers and users of robotic technology based systems and services, as well as fostering the excellence of its science base.
Tuesday 18th of September in Brussels the Robotics PPP MoU event was celebrated (Mou stands for Memorandum Of Understanding), where Neelie Kroes (Vice-President of the European Commission), Bernd Liepert (EUROP Coordinator, CTO of KUKA and President of euRobotics aisbl) and Herman Bruyninckx (EURON Coordinator, Vice-President of euRobotics aisbl) have signed the Memorandum.
A toast on the birth of euRobotics!
For further information read the press release press release “Commission and European industry commit to bigger and better robotics sector”, and also have a look at the website of European Robotics Technology Platform.
Hereby a collection of some more pictures of the recent event with Humanoid Service Robot REEM of PAL Robotics at the Shopping Mall L’Illa in Barcelona!
Check the events calendar of PAL Robotics to know the next events where REEM or PAL Robotics will be present!
Next on the agenda is IROS 2012, the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, at Vilamoura, Portugal, starting 7th of October!
REEM, PAL Robotics fascinating humanoid service robot, surprised the crowd last Friday 28th of September, at the Shopping Mall L’Illa, where the robot showed some of its features to the visitors.
REEM at the Mercedes-Benz promotion booth at Shopping Mall L’Illa
From around 10.00 to 17.00 hours the robot moved around various areas of this high scale shopping mall, guiding people around, handing out information to visitors through its dynamic information point and entertaining children.
REEM at the FNAC at Shopping Mall L’Illa
Some more pictures will be posted soon – keep an eye on the blog!!!
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