The final event of the Interreg Sudoe Project COMMANDIA was successfully held last September 30th as an online event. A summary of the project was presented by the coordinator of the project, Youcef Mezouar. After the introduction and summary of the project, the event continued with the presentations from the different partners of the consortium with special emphasis on technical, scientific, dissemination activities and achievements. To conclude, a round table with open live discussion was held with the participants in the event.

You can find a video with that motivates Project COMMANDIA in the following link . Another video here gives an introduction and overview of the project goals. One of the results of the project is a demonstrator that implements some of the techniques developed within the project to manipulate deformable objects. This is explained in this video .

During the COMMANDIA final event we had the opportunity to learn about the work that five partners (SIGMA, U. Alicante, INESCOP, U. Zaragoza, U. Coimbra) developed across three countries (Portugal, Spain, France) on the topic of Collaborative Robotic Mobile Manipulation of Deformable Objects in Industrial Applications. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all those involved in the success of this project.

Newsletter 2021-09

We are happy to announce that INESCOP will present COMMANDIA results in SIMAC 2021.

SIMAC is the International exhibitions of machines and technologies for footwear, leather goods and tanning industry (22-24 September 202, at Fiera Milano Rho, Italy). At SIMAC TANNING TECH you’ll find the most important manufacturers of machines for footwear manufacturing, leather goods and tanneries, accessories and component, chemical products, prototyping systems, lab machinery and equipment, consumables, automation, waste treatment systems and equipment, moulds and die cutters, management and production cycle, logistics, finished-product testing, conveyor systems, etc.

You are welcome to visit us in booth B04 at pavilion 14 from 22nd to 24th of September. See more details here.

You can also take a look to this video for an introduction to the COMMANDIA results.

Different students have presented their final degree projects in the framework of COMMANDIA:

“Development of a practical demonstrator in ROS for the UR10 robot manipulator” by Ignacio Herrera Seara

In this work, the UR10 collaborative robot has been used together with the ROS environment for the development of several practical applications, which have been tested both in simulation and in a real environment. The control of the robot movements has been developed through the MoveIt framework. The implemented applications have been the following: making drawings on a canvas by the robot, extraction and drawing of contours of real objects and, finally, teleoperation of the robot. In addition, the last two applications make use of the RGB-D Realsense D435 camera for their operation.

“Multi-camera mapping with RGB-D sensor” by Juan García-Lechuz Sierra

As with people, many tasks assigned to robots require the coordination of several of them to be carried out. One of them is the perception of the environment, when it has a certain complexity and its analysis is too computationally or time-consuming. For this coordination to be effective, the development of collaborative techniques that take into account the variability of the environment and result in a robust analysis of the environment and as complete as possible is required. The objective of this work is to obtain the representation in three dimensions of different environments, using a moving RGB-D sensor together with an application that allows its development in several sessions, representing the joint work between several cameras placed in different mobile robots to generate a single map. In addition, the My Find Object application is developed to censor objects and surfaces during the generation of the map, processing the images obtained by the RGB-D sensors to eliminate the information of these objects before it is introduced in the application from which the representation in three dimensions is obtained.

“Deformable object manipulation in multi-robot environments” by Andrés Otero García

A case is studied in which multiple IRB120 robots from ABB manipulate simultaneously a deformable object, such as a cloth. The objective is to develop a simulation in which at least two robots can perform synchronized movements to make changes in the deformable object, such as displacement or deformation, without colliding with the object during manipulation.

Join us in the final event of Project COMMANDIA!

This will be an online dissemination meeting held via Zoom on 30th September. During this event the results obtained in the COMMANDIA project will be disseminated to the public.

COMMANDIA stands for Collaborative Robotic Mobile Manipulation of Deformable Objects in Industrial Applications. This is a project supported by the Interreg Sudoe Programme, which is financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The main goal of this project is to improve the competitiveness and work conditions of industries where deformable objects have to be manipulated directly by human operators in order to control their shapes during production.

The event will first present the framework of COMMANDIA. After the introduction and summary of the project, the event will continue with the presentations from the different partners of the consortium (SIGMA Clermont, INESCOP, Universidad de Zaragoza, Universidad de Alicante, Universidade de Coimbra) with special emphasis on technical, scientific, dissemination activities and achievements. To conclude, a round table with open live discussion will be held with the participants in the event.

Date: 30 September 2021 (Thursday)
Time: 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM, Paris time
Place: Zoom link

All the partners of the SUDOE project COMMANDIA have meeting today on July 6, 2021 to present and discuss their latest advances.

CFP: Robotic Handling of Deformable Objects

Motivation

There is a growing interest in the robotics community to investigate the handling of deformable objects. The ability to interact with deformable objects promises new applications for robots: cable assembly in industrial settings, doing laundry in households, dressing assistance in elderly care, organs and tissues manipulation in surgical operations, or fragile samples collection in underwater/space robotics, to name a few. However, deformable objects are considerably more complex to deal with than rigid ones. Specifically, some of the new challenges involved in handling object deformation are the following:

1. The difficulty of sensing the deformation,
2. The infinite degrees of freedom of the deformation configuration,
3. The complexity of the high nonlinearity in modeling the deformation.

As a result, there is a necessity for novel methodological and technological approaches in this field, and these advances need to cover the full spectrum of robotic problems and tasks (perception, modeling, planning, and control).

Therefore, the aim of this special issue is to collect the latest research results that handle deformable objects in various robotic applications.

List of topics

Topics of interest for this special issue include and are not limited to:

• Sensing (e.g., vision, tactile) of deformable objects
• Robotic manipulation of deformable objects (planning, control, grasping, grippers design, etc.)
• Modeling of deformable objects for robotic handling
• Multi-robot and human-robot handling of deformable objects
• Benchmarking robotic handling of deformable objects
• Robot learning for handling deformable objects
• Mobile manipulation of deformable objects (with legged, wheeled, aerial or underwater robots)

Timeline

The special issue will follow the following timeline:

23 June 2021 Call for Papers
23 Sept 2021 Papercept open for submission
8 Oct 2021 Submission deadline (Extended to 22 October)
2 Jan 2022 Authors receive RA-L reviews and recommendation
16 Jan 2022 Authors of accepted MS submit final RA-L version
1 Feb 2022 Authors of R&R MS resubmit revised MS
8 Mar 2022 Authors receive final RA-L decision
22 Mar 2022 Authors submit final RA-L files
27 Mar 2022 Camera ready version appears in RA-L on Xplore
6 April 2022 Final Publication

Guest Editors of the Special Issue

Jihong Zhu
(TU Delft/Honda Research Institute Europe, Netherlands/Germany)
Claire Dune
(Laboratoire COSMER – EA 7398, Université de Toulon, France)
Miguel Aranda
(CNRS, Clermont Auvergne INP, Institut Pascal, Université Clermont Auvergne, France)
Youcef Mezouar
(CNRS, Clermont Auvergne INP, Institut Pascal, Université Clermont Auvergne, France)
Juan Antonio Corrales
(University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Pablo Gil
(University of Alicante, Spain)
Gonzalo López-Nicolás
(University of Zaragoza, Spain)

People from INESCOP (José F. Gómez, José M. Gutiérrez, Jesús Arregui y Maria D. Fabregat) have published the article “Robots para el ensamblado de calzado” in the journal “Revista del Calzado”.

Newsletter 2021-03

“Simulation of soft bodies in ROS and Gazebo” by Nicolás Iván Sanjuán Tejedor

The main objective of this work was to deepen the modeling of deformable objects in the field of robotics. As a result, in this work a simulation of a cloth-like deformable object has been carried out in the 3D robotics simulator Gazebo and the ROS (Robot Operating System) working environment by developing specific plugins.