16.02.2025
LunarAssembly

Large Time-Delay Teleoperation for Enabling Robotic Assembly on the Moon through Extended Reality and Machine Learning

Recent scientific discoveries about the presence of water-ice on moon have led to an increased interest in lunar space missions. For the construction and maintenance of future lunar bases, robotic technologies will become crucial. Teleoperation of robotic systems is an established technology that allows an operator to control a remote robot from a dislocated operator station. The level of emersion of the operator in the remote scene can be significantly increased by the use of haptic feedback. However, for ground-based teleoperation of a lunar robot, significant time delays in the order of several seconds occur, which prevent nowadays teleoperation technology to be applied in such scenarios. While effective control frameworks are available to handle delays up to ~1s, the performance of these algorithms drastically degrades when the delay increases.

The LunarAssembly project treats a fundamental scientific challenge, namely the teleoperation of robotic systems under large time delays, motivated by a scenario of remote assembly on the Moon. We believe that such high delays require novel paradigms for teleoperation with an appropriate interplay between autonomous functions and human intervention. We will develop fundamental extensions of the time-domain passivity framework with the aim of improving transparency under high time delay. These novel control algorithms are combined with a curriculum-based framework for incremental learning of autonomous skills, leveraging recent progress in ML for robotics. All this will be enabled by XR technologies based on 3D reconstruction of the remote environment. Besides the progress in these individual research fields, we believe that an innovation also lies in the appropriate interplay of these technologies.

Project partners:

  • ACIN Robotic Systems Lab (TU Wien)
  • ICT Autonomous Systems Lab (TU Wien)
  • Space Robotics Research Group, SnT, University of Luxembourg

Funding Organization:

Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

  08.01.2025
Caring Robots // Robotic Care

Our aim is to re-imagine robotic technology in care by developing technology that is useful, safe, meaningful, and wanted, through a design process that involves caregivers, people in care, care organizations, and other stakeholders. The project Caring Robots // Robotic Care is a transdisciplinary research collaboration by TU Wien, IT:U Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria, Caritas Wien, and Technisches Museum Wien.

The development of robots for use in care is a much-discussed scenario that is strongly polarized. On the one hand, there is the hope that (robotic) technology will help us meet the challenges of demographic change, support caregivers, and help people lead self-determined lives. On the other hand, there are fears that robots will replace human care and push people in need of care into social marginalization. The goal of this project is to explore possible and desirable roles of robots or similar technologies in the complex context of care. We aim to bring a wide range of actors – caregivers, clients, interest groups, users, and political decision-makers – together with experts from robotics, computer science, and sociology, to collectively ask the question how technology can and should (or should not) change the future of care.

  08.01.2025
MANiBOT

MANiBOT aims to empower bi-manual, mobile, service robots with superior physical capabilities able to perform a wide variety of manipulation tasks, with highly diverse objects, in a human-like manner and performance, in diverse, challenging environments.

The project seeks to revolutionise the robotics landscape by enhancing robot’s handling skills, including simple grasping, pick-and-place operations, bi-manual and non-prehensile manipulation, and ensuring adaptive responses to changing environments or to the properties of objects.

To achieve these capabilities, innovations will be developed in the fields of advanced environment understanding, efficient manipulation techniques, robot cognitive functions and physical intelligence. The researchers will implement their solutions with a focus on baggage handling and supermarket shelves’ restocking, with piloting of robots in relevant environments.

Partners:
Centre for Research and Technology Hellas

Fraport Greece

TWI Hellas

University of Bristol

BioRobotics Institute of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies

Central Institute for Labour Protection – National Research Institute (CIOP-PIB)

Diamantis Masoutis SA

Asea Brown Boveri SA (ABB)

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

The Technical University of Darmstadt

Schwarz Digits

The University of Burgos (UBU)

  08.01.2025
TraceBot

Today manual procedures still dominate when it comes to creating and testing new healthcare products. This is because regulations require certainty in the execution of each process step and systematic checking to verify task completion, known as traceability. A particular challenge in this field is the handling of sterile medical products. Lab automation with dexterous and reasoning robots is the solution.

The EU funded TraceBot project aims at addressing healthcare-related processes, and more exactly the membrane-based sterility testing process. The objective of TraceBot is to bring verifiable actions to robot manipulation by reasoning over sensor-actor trails in a traceability framework based on digital-twin technology and extend current robot motion planners with the automatic execution of self-checking procedures that create a semantic trace of the actions performed. The goal is to create robotic systems able to understand what they perceive and do, to ensure that any manipulation action is verified, thus meeting the needs of the regulated environment.

The TraceBot project brings together six strong partners from five countries: Astech Projects Limited (England), Commissariat à l‘Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (France), Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation (Spain), Invite GmbH (Germany), Technische Universität Wien (Austria) and Universität Bremen (Germany) and is being guided by representatives of the pharmaceutical industry. Each partner contributes its own expertise by providing a solution working hand-in-hand with each other partner’s solution. This cooperation will permit the development of tactile grippers for handling medical products, the design of a set of manipulation skills to execute the regulatory checking actions for every assembly step, the generation of an intuitive programming method for a quick adaptation to novel products and tasks and, last but not least, the development of a reasoning framework to monitor and control the safe and failure-resistant operation of the robot system, in order to meet the need of safety-critical automation. The TraceBot project’s coordination, communication and dissemination is carried out by the health network BioLAGO (Germany).

  08.01.2025
iChores

iChores is a project with the scientific goal of creating collaborative human‑robot interfaces for intuitive interaction through multiple modalities.
Our research focuses on investigating the methods that enable a collaborative robot to extract task‑relevant information from the gaze and gestures of a human partner, and how gaze, gesture, and speech information can be combined for a more natural and intuitive interface. We employ a user‑centered design methodology and explore research questions and hypotheses regarding the impact of combining modalities on the robot’s understanding, error count, task duration, user experience, comfort, and trust.

Partners:
Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Institute of Informatics Robotics and Cybernetics

Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Institute of Philisophy

  09.10.2024
SpecTrackular

Project goals

  • Development of a telescope system for spectroscopy analysis of space debris
  • Self-learning pointing model
  • Improved telescope tracking via orbital data measurement

Description

More satellites have been launched in the year 2023 than any year prior. 40% of all objects currently tracked within earth’s orbit have been sent there in the last four years. An unwanted side effect of this trend is a steady increase in the amount of space debris orbiting earth. Should the trend set in previous years continue, space debris will become an ever increasing threat to satellites. Until there is a global plan to prevent future as well as remove current space debris, an improvement in orbit prediction accuracy is vital. Thereby, unlikely collisions can be detected and the lifetime of satellites extended.

ACINOGS: Optical ground station

SpecTrackular aims to develop a telescope system capable of measuring the orbital path of space debris and allow spectroscopic characterization. Therefore, high-precision pointing and tracking of the telescope system, an improvement of the orbital path based on collected data and a spectroscopic measurement of the debris object are needed. Reflectance spectroscopy requires particularly precise tracking, because the light source, aperture and detector need to be aligned within a few arcseconds.

In order to achieve the required tracking accuracy, a self-learning pointing model will be developed, which can adapt to any emerging misalignment. Using the updated telescope system, the discrepancy between publicly available orbital data and the actual orbit can be measured and integrated into future predictions. The combination of the presented advancements will hopefully lead to a telescope system capable of tracking space debris for minutes at a time, with a tracking accuracy of less than <2” and, thereby, enable spectroscopic measurements. A spectroscopic analysis of the incoming light can give information on the material, pose and rotation of the debris object, which can, in turn, lead to further improvement of the orbit prediction accuracy.

Use case

  • Space debris surveillance

Project partners

  • ASA Astrosysteme GmbH

Funding

  • FFG – Research Promotion Agency, Austrian Space Applications Programme (ASAP)

  09.08.2024
Development of the AI-based autonomous task planning and robot teaching solution for highly complex manufacturing assembly process

The project aims to develop complex manipulation skills with dual arm manipulaltors for industrial manufacturing and assembly processes.

Partners

  • KIMM (coordinator)
  • KITECH
  • KAERI
  • KETI
  • KIRO
  • KAIST
  • Lline
  • TU Wien

Funding

South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE)

  09.08.2024
TUW/DLR Joint Laboratory on Human Centered Robotics

The TUW-DLR Joint Laboratory on Human Centered Robotics is a virtual Competence Center between TU Wien and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The mission of the Joint Laboratory is to conduct internationally leading research in the area of Human Centered Robotics with a particular focus on real-time control and machine learning in human-robot interaction. The current activities in the joint lab are clustered in three main topic areas:

  • Agile Legged Locomotion
  • Dexterous Whole-Body-Control for Floating Base Manipulators
  • Human-Robot-Interaction

Participants:

  13.06.2024
HiFliTE

Humanoid robots are designed to mimic humans’ physical appearance and intricate movements. The quest for creating humanoid robots with human-like motion capabilities represents a fundamental milestone in robotics. On one side, researchers focus on providing robots with the same ability as humans to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. On the other hand, researchers focus on designing dynamic controllers that enable humanoid robots to run or jump at different elevations, improving their mobility in unstructured environments.

In this context, the HiFliTE project aims at making two-legged robots able to perform tasks not feasible for the robot structure (e.g., because of height, joint position limits, lack of limbs) by exploiting the flight phase of a jump. To achieve this goal, a high-level control framework will be designed to plan the motion during the phases of take-off, flight, and landing. During the flight phase, the goal will be controlling one end-effector of the robot to perform a defined task while the rest of the body compensates for the end-effector motion and stabilizes the robot. This framework will be validated on a bipedal robot that is not equipped with arms to perform the task of opening the door. Since the robot has no arms, during the flight phase, one leg will be controlled to kick on the door handle/panic bar, and the other one and the torso to compensate for the motion.

 

 

Funding

ÖWA and FWF

  01.06.2024
HängMan

The HängMan project aims at a novel technical solution for maintenance and in-contact inspection of large-scale infrastructure and industrial facilities, which require an operation in hardly accessible areas in large height. While unmanned aerial vehicles are already in use for the contactless inspection tasks, there exists no widely applicable solution for manipulation tasks, which require a direct physical interaction in contact. The envisioned system consists of a motorized base unit equipped with propellers and a manipulator arm. The base is carried and roughly put in place at the required task location by an external crane system. Compared to conventional aerial systems, the proposed system can carry much higher loads and is able to exert high external forces onto the environment. The on-board propellers are utilized for stabilizing the undesired oscillation of the supported base and for fine positioning the system, while interaction forces due to the motion and manipulation of the manipulator are compensated. In the project, we will integrate a prototype of the system and evaluate the performance for precise positioning as well as for manipulation of the environment. Moreover, also the influence of external disturbances, such as wind, on the accuracy of the system shall be analyzed. The system will finally be tested in two example applications for inspection and maintenance. Possible application areas of the envisioned system lie in the maintenance, inspection, and repair of large-scale facilities in the oil and gas industry, the maintenance of windmills, bridge pillars, buildings, solar collectors, as well as in the maintenance of large-scale infrastructure of the energy sector. These applications require the use of well-trained personnel, such as industrial climbers, and therefore have high cost and time requirements.

Funding

The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)