Autonomous Service Robots

Service robots are aimed to provide services to humans instead of manufacturing purposes. E. g. they shall autonomously carry out monotonous, dangerous or tedious tasks. Crucial prerequisites for performing services are mobility and autonomy.

On flat surfaces, wheels are most efficient. For rough terrain or the anthroposphere (characterized by stairs etc.) leg locomotion seems to be more advantageous. Approaches are mainly taken from nature, where quadruped and six legged creatures are common. The control of bipeds is usually more complicated, but they are more flexible in their motion and better adapted to the human environment.

The research at our institute aims at the development of servicerobots for use in human environments. In the course of this research various wheel-based and leg-based robots have been developed with a main focus on bipedal robots and full autonomy.

Particular projects are

• BARt-UH, a bipedal robot with 19 active degrees of freedom.
• LISA, an experimental robot for the research of artificial gait pattern synthesis and stabilization of two-legged machines. A specialty of this lower-limbs-only robot is the parallel manipulator design of the hip joints.
• Falling down and standing up of bipedal two-legged robots.
• Artificial sense of balance, fusion of inertial measurement data with odometric and optical information.
• Optical vicinity sensor for^obstacle avoidance and selflocalization.
• SNOWBALL, a six-legged walking machine with a rather simple structure. It primarily aims at educational use by allowing students to test their own hard- and software-extensions during project works.

Main research fields

• Development of robots with autonomous operation.
• Intelligent path planning for the human environment consisting of flat surfaces with different inclinations, obstacles and stairs.
• Navigation in unknown environment.
• Optical sensors for the detection of obstacles and environment structure as well as for self localization
• Artificial sense of balance.
• Nonlinear, adaptive und predictive control.
• Development of control concepts for elastic robot structures.
• Parallel kinematics.
• Robot communication and robot cooperation.