Dealing with physical interactions between a robot and the environment. It includes studies of contact dynamics, switching control, compliant manipulation, sensor performance/processing, active sensing, and abstraction to world modelling and planning.
Environment Interactions
NASA Valkyrie
Used for control, motion planning, sensing and state estimation.
This item is unique within the UK.
ATI Gamma Force/Torque Sensor
This equipment enables force and torque sensing in order for robot manipulators to interact either with humans or with the physical environment. In ECR, we are developing physically interactive assistant robots to help people with finely skilled manipulations. The robotic assistants are usually admittance controlled, which means that the force/torque sensor attached to the end-effector captures the force/torque impact on the robot and then the end-point position/orientation is updated according to this force/torque reading.
EMYS
Husky UGV
Unmanned Ground Vehicle used for navigation, manipulation, motion planning.
Kuka YouBot Mobile Platform Team
The YouBot is a small, versatile mobile robot, designed as an educational robot platform that is also useful for rapidly prototyping ideas involving several mobile robots. The YouBot consists of an omnidirectional platform, with a 5 DOF arm and a 2-finger gripper. Our YouBots come equipped with an array of touch sensors mounted in a custom made harness, to allow for the robots to be used in contact prone environments.
Within ECR, we have used the YouBots for autonomous and multi-robot navigation experiments.
It is available in a few other UK locations.
Baxter Robot
Baxter is a two-armed industrial robot with an animated face. It is 5'10" – 6'3" tall with a pedestal, and weighs 306 lbs including the pedestal. It is designed to be used for simple industrial jobs such as loading, unloading, sorting, and handling of materials, in small and medium-sized companies.
Within ECR, we use Baxter for a variety of table-top manipulation experiments, and as a teleoperation platform for developing human-robot interface technologies.
Baxter is available in a few other UK locations.
PR2 Humanoid
The PR2 is a “personal robot”, designed as a common hardware and software platform for robot researchers. The PR2 has two 7-DOF arms with a payload of 1.8 kilograms, and a rich suite of sensors including a 5-megapixel camera, a tilting laser range finder, and an inertial measurement unit.