A message from the ECHORD coordinator Alois Knoll

In January and February most of the work was put into the implementation of essential elements from the cognitive system, like the core software framework and the optical flow estimation module. The structure of the core framework strictly implements the idea of modular system design. Essential modules were programmed,...

The work in 2011 was focused on defining requirements and characterizing components of the system,which will be used to carry out the experiments. In cooperation with our partners, Reis Robotics and KUKA, the experiments were discussed. As our partners are developers and manufacturers in the field of industrial robotics,...

In this step of the experiment conception, the robot control design took place. There is now a robot control architecture with an extended impedance controller and an open communication interface to the industrial robot control box. Further the safety system has beeing integrated into the robot control and the experiment...

In July and August the work was focused on the completion of task 2 and task 3. At the end of August a meeting with our partners KUKA and Reis was held at the IPR[1], where the results of task 2 and 3 were presented. Also their role in the upcoming tasks 4 and 5 were discussed and defined. For the completion of the tasks 2...

In November and December the focus lay on tasks 4 and 5 for the IPR, in which gesture and action recognition and path planning was to be incorporated into the framework. For task 4, the conceptual design of the gesture based interaction was determined and two gesture classes were identified. In task 5 especially the path...

In January and February, the work was focused on the development of probabilistic methods for the gesture based human robot interaction (tasks 4), and the task planning and task dependent adaption of robot motion planning (task 5). Also the deliverables 2.1 and 2.2 were completed. For the hand gesture analysis, a...

In March and April, the work was focused on the further development of the command gesture approach and the task planning module. Also, the ideas for the robust command gesture classification were submitted as a paper at a workshop at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference in Berlin. The previous command...

In May and June, the work was focused on the design and implementation of a movement gesture concept and corresponding task planning developments. Moreover an object recognition scheme was implemented for seamless gesture based object selection. Also, the ideas for the two stage gesture classification approach...

Study results In the last two months our main focus was on analyzing the data that we collected with our FlexIRob system during the user study on physical human robot interaction at Harting. We were able to evaluate the questionnaire and got first insights about the perception of our system by potential co-workers....

In May and June the work was focused on the training of the classifier for the body part detection, and the build-up of the multi-camera setup including the implementation of the calibration and registration step. Unfortunately the training of the classifier did not deliver the expected results, so that the existing approach...