Our biggest event in the last two months was the preparation and realization of our exhibition an the Hannover fair (08.04. - 12.04.2013). We presented our enhanced FlexIRob system as it was evaluated in our user study with workers at Harting. In particular, we presented the fast configuration of the Kuka LWR IV to a confined workspace and our Assisted Gravition Compensation mode which allows to teach a trajectory assisted by the robot in avoiding collisions with the environment. Our booth was part of the trade-show presentation of the Spitzencluster "Intelligente Technische Systems OstWestfalenLippe (it's owl)" where we represented the activities of Bielefeld University, especially of the CoR-Lab and the CITEC, in this area.

The fair was a big success. Our system ran well through the whole week and we gathered a lot of positive feedback from the visitors of our booth. We thank Harting for sponsoring the nice obstacles for our presentation.  Several members of the local governments like the mayor of Bielefeld, Pit Clausen, Svenja Schulze, the minister for research and education of NRW, state secretary Helmut Dockter, and district president Marianne Thomann-Stahl have visited our exhibition. The picture below shows Svenja Schulze and Helmut Dockter at our booth. On Friday, we had the opportunity to present our system to three groups of pupils which visited us in the context of an information day for pupils interested in engineering oriented careers. I have attached a report in the local newspaper as deliverable about our dessimination activity at the Hannover fair.

As part of our dissemination activities we organized the Workshop “Technology Monitoring: Robotics today and tomorrow – Technology towards Assistive Automation”. It was part of the OWL MASCHINENBAU Academy. OWL MASCHINENBAU is a network of innovation targeting to strengthen the economic and technological power of the regional industry in production technology. It is an association of local industry, SME, and research institutions of the region East-Westphalia. It targets to transfer research to application in industry, to initiate cooperative networks, and to organize advanced training.

Our workshop focused on challenges arising from the dramatic changes of technology in automation and particular robotics especially with regard to close collaboration of humans and machines. This collaboration has big potential to improve manufacturing work flow strengthening the global competitiveness and sustaining the local value chain. The workshop approached the topic “interactive robotics” from two sides: it introduced future technologies (redundancies, force control, innovative controls) enabling human-robot interaction and showed methods for interactive configuration and safe operation of such systems. The goal of the workshop was to give an outlook on technology which might be introduced in the next years into the automation and production field and will influence future production systems. Questions concerning safety, acceptance, and the role of the Spitzencluster it’s owl2 (Intelligente Technische Systeme OstWestfalenLippe) for the local area completed the workshop. The main presenters were Dr. P. Pfaff from KUKA Laboratories, Dr. M. Ruskowski from Carl Cloos Schweißtechnik, Dr. F. R ̈thling from Robert Bosch GmbH, Prof. Dr. A. Schneider from FH Bielefeld, and Dr. A. Swadzba and Prof. Dr. J. Steil from Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab). The workshop ended with hand-on demonstrations in the CoR-Lab.